A Study of 2-Additive Splitting for Solving Advection-Diffusion-Reaction Equations

An initial-value problem consists of an ordinary differential equation subject to an initial condition. The right-hand side of the differential equation can be interpreted as additively split when it is comprised of the sum of two or more contributing factors. For instance, the right-hand sides of initial-value problems derived from advection-diffusion-reaction equations are comprised of the sum of terms emanating from three distinct physical processes: advection, diffusion, and reaction. In some cases, solutions to initial-value problems can be calculated analytically, but when an analytic solution is unknown or nonexistent, methods of numerical integration are used to calculate solutions. The runtime performance of numerical methods is problem dependent; therefore, one must choose an appropriate numerical method to achieve favourable performance, according to characteristics of the problem. Additive methods of numerical integration apply distinct methods to the distinct contributing factors of an additively split problem. Treating the contributing factors with methods that are known to perform well on them individually has the potential to yield an additive method that outperforms single methods applied to the entire (unsplit) problem. Splittings of the right-hand side can be physics-based, i.e., based on physical characteristics of the problem, such as advection, diffusion, or reaction terms. Splittings can also be based on linearization, called Jacobian splitting in this thesis, where the linearized part of the problem is treated with one method and the rest of the problem is treated with another. A comparison of these splitting techniques is performed by applying a set of additive methods to a test suite of problems. Many common non-additive methods are also included to serve as a performance baseline. To perform this numerical study, a problem-solving environment was developed to evaluate permutations of problems, methods, and their associated parameters. The test suite is comprised of several distinct advection-diffusion-reaction equations that have been chosen to represent a wide range of common problem characteristics. When solving split problems in the test suite, it is found that additive Runge–Kutta methods of orders three, four, and five using Jacobian splitting generally outperform those same methods using physics-based splitting. These results provide evidence that Jacobian splitting is an effective approach when solving such initial-value problems in practice