Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 878497, 11 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/878497
Research Article

On the Computation of Blow-Up Solutions for Nonlinear Volterra Integrodifferential Equations

Department of Mathematics, University of Johannesburg, Cnr Siemert & Beit Streets, Doornfontein 2028, South Africa

Received 7 February 2012; Revised 19 March 2012; Accepted 20 March 2012

Academic Editor: Kuppalapalle Vajravelu

Copyright © 2012 P. G. Dlamini and M. Khumalo. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We make use of an adaptive numerical method to compute blow-up solutions for nonlinear ordinary Volterra integrodifferential equations (VIDEs). The method is based on the implicit midpoint method and the implicit Euler method and is named the implicit midpoint-implicit Euler (IMIE) method and was used to compute blow-up solutions in semilinear ODEs and parabolic PDEs in our earlier work. We demonstrate that the method produces superior results to the adaptive PECE-implicit Euler (PECE-IE) method and the MATLAB solver of comparable order just as it did in our previous contribution. We use quadrature rules to approximate the integral in the VIDE and demonstrate that the choice of quadrature rule has a significant effect on the blow-up time computed. In cases where the problem contains a convolution kernel with a singularity we use convolution quadrature.