Even if numerical simulation of the Burgers’ equation is well documented in the literature, a detailed literature survey indicates that gaps still exist for comparative discussion regarding the physical and mathematical significance of the Burgers’ equation. Recently, an increasing interest has been developed within the scientific community, for studying non-linear convective–diffusive partial differential equations partly due to the tremendous improvement in computational capacity. Burgers’ equation whose exact solution is well known, is one of the famous non-linear partial differential equations which is suitable for the analysis of various important areas. A brief historical review of not only the mathematical, but also the physical significance of the solution of Burgers’ equation is presented, emphasising current research strategies, and the challenges that remain regarding the accuracy, stability and convergence of various schemes are discussed. One of the objectives of this paper is to discuss the recent developments in mathematical modelling of Burgers’ equation and thus open doors for improvement. No claim is made that the content of the paper is new. However, it is a sincere effort to outline the physical and mathematical importance of Burgers’ equation in the most simplified ways. We throw some light on the plethora of challenges which need to be overcome in the research areas and give motivation for the next breakthrough to take place in a numerical simulation of ordinary/partial differential equations.

A modified Keller box (MKB) method is applied to the moving boundary problem (MBP) based on the boundary immobilisation technique. MBPis the modelling of the melting or solidification process. The mathematical importance of this problem is that the boundary of the domain is also unknown. The moving front position depends on time; hence this problem is inherently non-linear. Simulation time is used to evaluate the computational complexityof the schemes. The proposed scheme is compared to the existing schemes in the literature regarding the accuracy and simulation time. In both space and time, the proposed scheme has a second-order accuracy. For the known boundary, the constant boundary condition is taken and the proposed numerical algorithm is validated with the corresponding similarity solution. The MKB method provides good agreement with the similarity solution and also confirms that the computational rate of convergence of our scheme is two. This paper gives an idea of the MKB scheme for an MBP. This mathematical framework can be extended to 2D and 3D MBPs.