An accurate application of the integral method applied to the diffusion of oxygen in absorbing tissue

Accurate integral methods are applied to a one dimensional moving boundary problem describing the diffusion of oxygen in absorbing tissue. These methods have been well studied for classic Stefan problems but this situation is unusual because there is no condition which contains the velocity of the moving boundary explicitly. This paper begins by giving a short time solution and then discusses some of the previous integral methods found in the literature. The main drawbacks of these solutions are that they cannot be solved from $t=0$ and also cannot determine the end behaviour. This is due to the non-uniform initial profile which integral methods typically fail to capture. The use of a novel transformation removes this non-uniformity and, on applying optimal integral methods to the resulting system, leads to simple and yet very accurate approximate solutions that overcome the deficiencies of previous methods.