Locally linearized fractional step methods for nonlinear parabolic problems

This work deals with the efficient numerical solution of a class of nonlinear time-dependent reaction–diffusion equations. Via the method of lines approach, we first perform the spatial discretization of the original problem by applying a mimetic finite difference scheme. The system of ordinary differential equations arising from that process is then integrated in time with a linearly implicit fractional step method. For that purpose, we locally decompose the discrete nonlinear diffusion operator using suitable Taylor expansions and a domain decomposition splitting technique. The totally discrete scheme considers implicit time integrations for the linear terms while explicitly handling the nonlinear ones. As a result, the original problem is reduced to the solution of several linear systems per time step which can be trivially decomposed into a set of uncoupled parallelizable linear subsystems. The convergence of the proposed methods is illustrated by numerical experiments.