Monotone iterative methods for solving nonlinear partial differential equations : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

A key aspect of the simulation process is the formulation of proper mathematical models. The model must be able to emulate the physical phenomena under investigation. Partial differential equations play a major role in the modelling of many processes which arise in physics, chemistry and engineering. Most of these partial differential equations cannot be solved analytically and classical numerical methods are not always applicable. Thus, efficient and stable numerical approaches are needed. A fruitful method for solving the nonlinear difference schemes, which discretize the continuous problems, is the method of upper and lower solutions and its associated monotone iterations. By using upper and lower solutions as two initial iterations, one can construct two monotone sequences which converge monotonically from above and below to a solution of the problem. This monotone property ensures the theorem on existence and uniqueness of a solution. This method can be applied to a wide number of applied problems such as the enzyme-substrate reaction diffusion models, the chemical reactor models, the logistic model, the reactor dynamics of gasses, the Volterra-Lotka competition models in ecology and the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction diffusion models. In this thesis, for solving coupled systems of elliptic and parabolic equations with quasi-monotone reaction functions, we construct and investigate block monotone iterative methods incorporated with Jacobi and Gauss--Seidel methods, based on the method of upper and lower solutions. The idea of these methods is the decomposition technique which reduces a computational domain into a series of nonoverlapping one dimensional intervals by slicing the domain into a finite number of thin strips, and then solving a two-point boundary-value problem for each strip by a standard computational method such as the Thomas algorithm. We construct block monotone Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel iterative methods with quasi-monotone reaction functions and investigate their monotone properties. We prove theorems on existence and uniqueness of a solution, based on the monotone properties of iterative sequences. Comparison theorems on the rate of convergence for the block Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel methods are presented. We prove that the numerical solutions converge to the unique solutions of the corresponding continuous problems. We estimate the errors between the numerical and exact solutions of the nonlinear difference schemes, and the errors between the numerical solutions and the exact solutions of the corresponding continuous problems. The methods of construction of initial upper and lower solutions to start the block monotone iterative methods are given