Copyright © 2011 Weiguo Zhang and Xiang Li. 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 focus on studying approximate solutions of damped oscillatory solutions of generalized KdV-Burgers equation and their error estimates. The theory of planar dynamical systems is employed to make qualitative analysis to the dynamical systems which traveling wave solutions of this equation correspond to. We investigate the relations between the behaviors of bounded traveling wave solutions and dissipation coefficient, and give two critical values λ1 and λ2 which can characterize the scale of dissipation effect, for right and left-traveling wave solution, respectively. We obtain that for the right-traveling wave solution if dissipation coefficient α≥λ1, it appears as a monotone kink profile solitary wave solution; that if 0<α<λ1, it appears as a damped oscillatory solution. This is similar for the left-traveling wave solution. According to the evolution relations of orbits in the global phase portraits which the damped oscillatory solutions correspond to, we obtain their approximate damped oscillatory solutions by undetermined coefficients method. By the idea of homogenization principle, we give the error estimates for these approximate solutions by establishing the integral equations reflecting the relations between exact and approximate solutions. The errors are infinitesimal decreasing in the exponential form.