by The Open University
Available in 5 free installments
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After studying this unit you should be able to:
understand how the wave and diffusion partial differential equations can be used to model certain systems;
determine appropriate simple boundary and initial conditions for such models;
find families of solutions for the wave equation, damped wave equation, diffusion equation and similar homogeneous linear second-order partial differential equations, subject to simple boundary conditions, using the method of separating the variables;
combine solutions of partial differential equations to satisfy given initial conditions by finding the coefficients of a Fourier series.
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