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In this chapter we investigate local errors and condition numbers in the BEM. The results of these investigations are important in guiding adaptive meshing strategies and solvability of linear systems in BEM. We show that the local error for the BEM with constant or linear elements decreases quadratically with the boundary element mesh size. We also investigate better ways of treating boundary conditions to reduce the local errors. The results of our numerical experiments confirm the theory. The values of the condition numbers of the matrices that appear in the BEM depend on the shape and size of the domain on which a problem is defined. For certain critical domains these condition numbers can even become infinitely large. We show that this holds for several classes of boundary value problems and propose a number of strategies to guarantee moderate condition numbers.

In the field of computational fluid dynamics, the finite volume method is dominant over other numerical techniques like the finite difference and finite element methods because the underlying physical quantities are conserved at the discrete level. In the present study, the finite volume method is used to solve an isotropic transient groundwater flow model to obtain hydraulic heads and flow through an aquifer. The objective is to discuss the theory of finite volume method and its applications in groundwater flow modelling. To achieve this, an orthogonal grid with quadrilateral control volumes has been used to simulate the model using mixed boundary conditions from Bwaise III, a Kampala Surburb. Results show that flow occurs from regions of high hydraulic head to regions of low hydraulic head until a steady head value is achieved.

The Cauchy problem for the heat equation is a model of situation where one seeks to compute the temperature, or heat-flux, at the surface of a body by using interior measurements. The problem is well-known to be ill-posed, in the sense that measurement errors can be magnified and destroy the solution, and thus regularization is needed. In previous work it has been found that a method based on approximating the time derivative by a Fourier series works well [Berntsson F. A spectral method for solving the sideways heat equation. Inverse Probl. 1999;15:891-906; Eldén L, Berntsson F, Regińska T. Wavelet and Fourier methods for solving the sideways heat equation. SIAM J Sci Comput. 2000;21(6):2187-2205]. However, in our situation it is not resonable to assume that the temperature is periodic which means that additional techniques are needed to reduce the errors introduced by implicitly making the assumption that the solution is periodic in time. Thus, as an alternative approach, we instead approximate the time derivative by using a cubic smoothing spline. This means avoiding a periodicity assumption which leads to slightly smaller errors at the end points of the measurement interval. The spline method is also shown to satisfy similar stability estimates as the Fourier series method. Numerical simulations shows that both methods work well, and provide comparable accuracy, and also that the spline method gives slightly better results at the ends of the measurement interval.