An assessment of numerical software for solving two-point boundary-value problems arising in heat transfer

The use of robust general-purpose user-oriented software packages for solving systems of two-point boundary-value problems for ordinary differential equations (BVODEs) is considered for the solution of BVODEs that commonly arise in the modeling of problems in heat transfer. This investigation involves three packages, DVCPR, COLSYS, and DTPTB, which implement the trapezoidal rule with deferred corrections, the method of spline collocation at Gaussian points, and multiple shooting, respectively. The effectiveness of the packages is demonstrated by examining their performance on a variety of BVODEs that have appeared in the literature