↜ Back to index Introduction to Numerical Analysis 1

# Lecture 5

In today’s lecture we will learn how to find a numerical solution of second order ordinary differential equations.

## 2nd order ordinary differential equations

Find the solution of

\left\{ \begin{aligned} y''(t) + y(t) &= 0, && t > 0,\\ y(0) &= 1,\\ y'(0) &= 0. \end{aligned} \right. \label{ode}

The exact solution of this second order differential equation is $$y(t) = \cos(t)$$.

We can use the already developed methods to solve this ODE by converting it to a first order system. Let us introduce two functions $$x_1$$ and $$x_2$$ by setting

\begin{aligned} x_1(t) &= y(t),\\ x_2(t) &= y'(t). \end{aligned}

Note that we then have the following first order system:

\left\{ \begin{aligned} x_1' &= x_2, && t > 0,\\ x_2' &= -x_1, && t > 0,\\ x_1(0) &= 1,\\ x_2(0) &= 0. \end{aligned} \right.

We will solve this system using the midpoint method from lecture 4 (the Runge-Kutta method of second order).

### Arrays in Fortran

We first need to learn how to store efficiently multiple values in Fortran like $$x_1$$, $$x_2$$.

We declare x as an array of dimension 2:

real, dimension(2) :: x

Then we can access the values in x as x(1) and x(2). Arrays can be initialized as

x(1) = 1.
x(2) = 0.

or using the shorthand notation

x = (/ 1., 0. /)

Fortran also supports array operations. That is, we can efficiently perform operations on a per-element basis. For example,

real, dimension(2) :: x, y, z
x = (/ 0., 1. /)
y = (/ 3., 5. /)
z = x + y
write(*,*) z

In this case z will be an array with values z(1) = x(1) + y(1) and z(2) = x(2) + y(2), so the printed result is 3. 6..

To declare a function that returns an array, we need to move the type declaration into the body to be able to specify the dimension:

function f(x, t)
implicit none
real, intent(in), dimension(2) :: x
real, intent(in) :: t
real, dimension(2) :: f

f(1) = x(2)
f(2) = - x(1)
end function

### Midpoint method for systems

Thanks to Fortran’s handling of arrays, we can reuse the code for the midpoint method from lecture 2 with minimal modifications. The only important changes are declaration of relevant variables as array of size 2.

We also move the definition of the function f into the body of the program into to the contains section. This way we do not have to declare f as external:

program name
...
contains
function f(x,t)
...
end function
end program

The resulting code is in file midpoint.f90. Run the code and plot the result in gnuplot. However, now for each time $$t$$ we have values $$x_1(t)$$ and $$x_2(t)$$:

Running the code

$gfortran midpoint.f90 -o a.exe && ./a.exe yields the output  0.00000000 1.00000000 0.00000000 0.100000001 0.995000005 -0.100000001 0.200000003 0.980024993 -0.199000001 0.300000012 0.955224872 -0.296007514 0.400000006 0.920848012 -0.390049964 0.500000000 0.877238750 -0.480184525 0.600000024 0.824834108 -0.565507472 0.699999988 0.764159203 -0.645163357 0.800000012 0.695822060 -0.718353450 0.900000036 0.620507598 -0.784343898 ... To plot the graphs of both functions $$x_1$$ and $$x_2$$ in gnuplot into one graph, we specify which data to plot by adding using 1:2 to the plot command to plot 1st vs. 2nd column, and using 1:3 to plot 1st vs. 3rd column: $ gfortran midpoint.f90 -o a.exe
\$ ./a.exe > sol.dat

and in gnuplot

plot 'sol.dat' using 1:2, 'sol.dat' using 1:3

Exercise: Estimate the error of the method.

## 4th order Runge-Kutta method

This time implement the 4th order Runge-Kutta method to solve the second order differential equation $$\eqref{ode}$$.

Use gnuplot to estimate the order of the method.

### Numerical precision

By default, variables declared as real are single precision floating point numbers. Single precision stores only about 7 decimal places. To increase the precision, we can request double precision floating point numbers by declaring the variables as real(8). Here 8 is the number of bytes used to store the number, which implies double precision since double precision variables can store about 15 decimal places. Single precision uses 4 bytes, and is therefore more memory efficient.

Fortran functions like cos, exp and abs work with single precision numbers. The double precision equivalents are dcos, dexp, dabs, etc.

Constants like 1. are single precision by default. To under double precision constants, we can use the scientific notation 1.0d0 or 1d0 for short.