ABSTRACT
A number of problems in various disciplines of engineering involve the phenomenon of mass transport. This can include transport through diffusion and convection of chemicals, pollutants, contaminants, and dissolved salts in water. This chapter describes mass transport for simple one-dimensional idealizations. It explains the differential equation governing one-dimensional mass transport. Relatively more computer time involved in solving the equations as compared to the time required for symmetric and banded systems. A number of integration schemes can be used to solve the matrix equations in the time domain. The behavior of the numerical solution can be influenced significantly due to the existence of the convection term. If the magnitude of the convection term is relatively large, the system is predominantly convective. This can render the solutions more susceptible to numerical instability. On the other hand, if the diffusion term predominates, the numerical solution can be well behaved.
