Iterative method for solving a nonlinear fourth order boundary value problem

In the study of transverse vibrations of a hinged beam there arises a boundary value problem for fourth order ordinary differential equation, where a significant difficulty lies in a nonlinear term under integral sign. In recent years several authors considered finite approximation of the problem and proposed an iterative method for solving the system of nonlinear equations obtained. The essence of the iteration is the simple iteration method for a nonlinear equation, although this is not shown in the papers of the authors. In this paper we propose a new approach to the solution of the problem, which is based on the reduction of it to finding a root of a nonlinear equation. In both cases, when the explicit form of this equation is found or not, the use of the Newton or Newton-type methods generate fast convergent iterative process for the original problem. The results of many numerical experiments confirm the efficiency of the proposed approach. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.