Details

Discrete Harmonic Functions and Electric Networks

Discrete harmonic functions have a natural interpretation in the context of electric networks. Interpret the lattice points in a 2D domain as nodes of an electric network connected with resistors, and let denote the voltage at the point . Then the function is a discrete harmonic function; see [1] for details.

Dirichlet Method of Relaxations

This is an iterative method for computing discrete harmonic functions with given boundary values. Starting with an arbitrary initial function satisfying the boundary conditions, the method constructs a sequence of functions defined by

.

As , approaches a harmonic function; see [1, p. 16].

Boundary Functions

Three families of boundary functions are provided for the outer and inner (if selected) boundaries of the domain:

and

,

,

where , , are user-defined parameters.

The values of at the boundary are random real numbers chosen uniformly from the interval , where is a user-defined parameter.

Initialization

For this Demonstration, we chose to initialize the values of in the interior of the domain to random real numbers chosen uniformly from the interval , whereis a user-defined parameter. Choosing as 0 is equivalent to initializing the values in the interior of to .

Dirichlet Energy

For continuous functions defined on some domain , the integral , where denotes the gradient, is called the Dirichlet energy integral. This integral can be interpreted as the potential energy of a system or as a measure of the "energy" of the surface . The smaller this integral, the flatter the surface. A characteristic property of harmonic functions is that they minimize the Dirichlet energy integral. From among all functions having given values on the boundary of , the harmonic function satisfying the given boundary conditions is the unique function that minimizes the Dirichlet energy integral.

The discrete analog of the Dirichlet energy integral is the sum over the squares of the differences of values of on all pairs of neighboring points; that is

,

where the sum runs over all interior lattice points in . In analogy to the continuous case, discrete harmonic functions are the unique functions that, for given boundary conditions, minimize the discrete Dirichlet energy.

Reference

[1] P. G. Doyle and J. L. Snell, Random Walks and Electric Networks, Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1984.