A new sine-Gordon equation expansion algorithm to investigate some special nonlinear differential equations

A new transformation method is developed using the general sine-Gordon travelling wave reduction equation and a generalized transformation. With the aid of symbolic computation, this method can be used to seek more types of solutions of nonlinear differential equations, which include not only the known solutions derived by some known methods but new solutions. Here we choose the double sine-Gordon equation, the Magma equation and the generalized Pochhammer-Chree (PC) equation to illustrate the method. As a result, many types of new doubly periodic solutions are obtained. Moreover when using the method to these special nonlinear differential equations, some transformations are firstly needed. The method can be also extended to other nonlinear differential equations. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.