Shooting methods for some steady diffusion and convection problems

For diffusion-dominated steady flows, classical second-order methods are usually used. A large number of iterations, and hence a long computing time, is required to solve the set of discretized equations using an iterative method. On the other hand, a direct solver is degraded because of the accumulation of round- off errors. For convection-dominated flows, first-order upwinding has been used over the past few decades but suffered from severe inaccuracy. In this paper we first discuss the accuracy improvement of solving a diffusion equation by shooting methods. We manage to achieve the theoretical order of accuracy as the mesh size decreases as far as single-precision arithmetic is concerned. We then discuss an application to the interface coupling of subproblems in the context of domain decomposition methods. Finally, we discuss high-order nonoscillatory solutions of a convection-diffusion equation based on shooting methods.