On the maximum principle and its application to diffusion equations

In this article, an analog of the maximum principle has been established for an ordinary differential operator associated with a semi‐discrete approximation of parabolic equations. In applications, the maximum principle is used to prove O(h²) and O(h⁴) uniform convergence of the method of lines for the diffusion Equation (1). The system of ordinary differential equations obtained by the method of lines is solved by an implicit predictor corrector method. The method is tested by examples with the use of the enclosed Mathematica module solveDiffusion. The module solveDiffusion gives the solution by O(h²) uniformly convergent discrete scheme or by O(h⁴) uniformly convergent discrete scheme. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2007