The blue curve you see above represents the graph of a function θ(x,t) for a fixed value of t.
The coordinate x varies in the horizontal direction. The left side of the white frame corresponds to x=-0.5, and the right side to x=0.5. The top of the white frame is θ=1, and the bottom θ=-1. The function θ is extended outside of the box as zero.
When you click "Start", the graph will start evolving following the equation.
A more feature rich page is avaliable here.
Luis Silvestre. Last update: August 7th, 2013.
Mesh size
This is the number of points used to sample the interval [0,1]. In particular h = 1/(N-1) . A large number could make the computation more accurate, but it can also make the website unresponsive if your computer cannot do the computations in time.
N = Time step
This is the time step we take at each iteration. A quantity that is too large here would make the computation inaccurate. A number that is too small would make the website unresponsive.
k = These settings are delicate. Choose the values carefully. The website may freeze if it cannot compute a time interval of 0.01 in one second.
Warning!
Your computer is too slow to perform this computation in real time. Try changing the mesh settings.