Convergence analysis of sectional methods for solving aggregation population balance equations: The cell average technique

The paper deals with the convergence analysis of the cell average technique given by J. Kumar et al. [3] to solve the nonlinear aggregation population balance equations. Similarly to our previous paper Giri et al. [1], which considered the fixed pivot technique, the main emphasis here is to check the convergence for five different types of uniform and non-uniform meshes. First, we observed that the cell average technique is second order convergent on a uniform, locally uniform and non-uniform smooth meshes. Secondly, the scheme is examined closely on an oscillatory and non-uniform random meshes. It is found that the scheme is only first accurate there. In spite of this, the cell average technique gives one order higher accuracy than the fixed pivot technique for locally uniform, oscillatory and random meshes. Several numerical simulations verify the mathematical results of the convergence analysis. Finally the numerical results obtained are also compared with those for the case of the fixed pivot technique.