The diagram below shows the true trajectory
of our ODE and the points separate by dt.
The Euler method
is an asymmetric method since it uses only information on
the nth point, or the "left" point, to find the position
and derivative (for example, the velocity in the equation of motion
example) at the n+1 point, or right point.
The Predictor-Corrector
method does somewhat better by using an average of the function
value at the n and (predicted) n+1 points to get a better estimate
of the new derivative.
Note also that these are first-order methods in the
dependent variable dt.
There are a number of improved methods that attempt
to take a more symmetric approach. In particular, they make a better
estimate of the slope at the midpoint between tn
and t(n+1).
We will concentrate here on midpoint method that is
also 2nd order in dt.
We begin with a first oder ODE:
For a dt
interval we can obtain an estimate at the midpoint position with
the Euler method:
Then, in turn, use this to obtain the midpoint slope
We can use this midpoint slope to estimate the position
across the full interval.. This approach is usually expressed in
such a way that the final formula looks similar to the Euler formula
by giving names to the intermediate terms (using
k by convention):
This set of equations is referred to as the midpoint
or second-order Runge-Kutta method.
Note that this approach is symmetric over the dt
segment and the term k2
is second order in dt.
As discussed earlier,
we usually will need to solve a set of such equations. For the equation
of motion we need to solve for both the position and the velocity
of an object responding to a force F(x,v,t)
:
then
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