Addititive Polynomial Block Methods, Part I: Framework and Fully-Implicit Methods

In this paper we generalize the polynomial time integration framework to additively partitioned initial value problems. The framework we present is general and enables the construction of many new families of additive integrators with arbitrary order-of-accuracy and varying degree of implicitness. In this first work, we focus on a new class of implicit-explicit polynomial block methods that are based on fully-implicit Runge-Kutta methods with Radau nodes. We show that the new integrators have improved stability compared to existing IMEX Runge-Kutta methods, while also being more computationally efficient due to recent developments in preconditioning techniques for solving the associated systems of nonlinear equations. For PDEs on periodic domains where the implicit component is trivial to invert, we will show how parallelization of the right-hand-side evaluations can be exploited to obtain significant speedup compared to existing serial IMEX Runge-Kutta methods. For parallel (in space) finite-element discretizations, the new methods obtain accuracy several orders of magnitude lower than existing IMEX Runge-Kutta methods, and/or obtain a given accuracy as much as 16 times faster in terms of computational runtime.