Development of RBF-DQ method for derivative approximation and its application to simulate natural convection in concentric annuli

 The radial basis functions (RBFs) have been proven to have excellent properties for interpolation problems, which can be considered as an efficient scheme for function approximation. In this paper, we will explore another type of approximation problem, that is, the derivative approximation, by the RBFs. A new approach, which is based on the differential quadrature (DQ) approximation for the derivative with RBFs as test functions, is proposed to approximate the first, second, and third order derivatives of a function. The performance of three commonly-used RBFs for some typical expressions of derivatives as well as the computation of one-dimensional Burgers equation are studied. Furthermore, the proposed method is applied to simulate natural convection in a concentric annulus by solving Navier–Stokes equations. The obtained results are compared well with exact data or benchmark solutions. Received: 27 June 2001 / Accepted: 29 July 2002