Practical Asymptotics

"Practical Asymptotics" is an effective tool for reducing the complexity of large-scale applied-mathematical models arising in engineering, physics, chemistry, and industry, without compromising their accuracy. It exploits the full potential of the dimensionless representation of these models by considering the special nature of the characteristic dimensionless quantities. It can be argued that these dimensionless quantities mostly assume extreme values, particularly for practical parameter settings. Thus, otherwise complicated models can be rendered far less complex and the numerical effort to solve them is greatly reduced. The effectiveness of "Practical Asymptotics" is demonstrated by 15 papers devoted to widely differing fields of applied science, such as glass-bottle production, semiconductors, surface-tension-driven flows, microwaving joining, heat generation in foodstuff production, chemical-clock reactions, low-Mach-number flows, to name a few. A strong plea is made for making asymptotics teaching an integral part of any numerics curriculum. Not only will asymptotics reduce the computational effort, it should also provide a fuller understanding of the underlying problems.