Accelerating exponential integrators to efficiently solve semilinear advection-diffusion-reaction equations

In this paper, we consider an approach to improve the performance of exponential Runge--Kutta integrators and Lawson schemes in cases where the solution of a related, but usually much simpler, problem can be computed efficiently. While for implicit methods such an approach is common (e.g., by using preconditioners), for exponential integrators this has proven more challenging. Here we propose to extract a constant coefficient differential operator from the semilinear advectiondiffusion-reaction equation for which, in many situations, efficient methods are known to compute the required matrix functions. Both a linear stability analysis and extensive numerical experiments show that the resulting schemes can be unconditionally stable. In fact, we find that exponential integrators of Runge--Kutta type and Lawson schemes can have better stability properties than similarly constructed implicit-explicit schemes. We also derive two new Lawson-type integrators that further improve on these stability properties. The overall effectiveness of the approach is highlighted by a number of performance comparisons on examples in two and three space dimensions.