An efficient high-order time integration method for spectral-element discontinuous Galerkin simulations in electromagnetics (Q2441125)

Efficient algorithms and a practical implementation of an explicit-type high-order timestepping method based on Krylov subspace approximations are investigated for possible application to large-scale engineering problems in electromagnetics. A semi-discrete form of the Maxwell equations is considered resulting from a high-order spectral-element discontinuous Galerkin discretization in space whose solution can be expressed analytically by a large matrix exponential of dimension \(\kappa \times \kappa\). The matrix exponential is projected into a small Krylov subspace by the Arnoldi process based on the modified Gram-Schmidt algorithm and performs a matrix exponential operation with a much smaller matrix of dimension \(m \times m\) (\(m \ll \kappa\)). For computing the matrix exponential, eigenvalues of the \(m \times m\) matrix are obtained using available library packages and an ordinary exponential function is computed for the eigenvalues. The scheme involves mainly matrix-vector multiplications, and its convergence rate is generally \(O(\Delta t^{m - 1})\) in time so that it allows for taking a larger timestep size as \(m\) increases. CPU time reduction is demonstrated compared with results from the five-stage fourth-order Runge-Kutta method for a certain accuracy. Error behaviors are demonstrated for long-time simulations. Case studies are also presented, showing loss of orthogonality that can be recovered by adding a low-cost reorthogonalization technique.