New resolution strategy for multi-scale reaction waves using time operator splitting, space adaptive multiresolution and dedicated high order implicit/explicit time integrators

We tackle the numerical simulation of reaction-diffusion equations modeling multi-scale reaction waves. This type of problem induces peculiar difficulties and potentially large stiffness which stem from the broad spectrum of temporal scales in the nonlinear chemical source term as well as from the presence of steep spatial gradients in the reaction fronts, spatially very localized. In this paper, we introduce a new resolution strategy based on time operator splitting and space adaptive multiresolution in the context of very localized and stiff reaction fronts. The paper considers a high order implicit time integration of the reaction and an explicit one for the diffusion term in order to build a time operator splitting scheme that exploits efficiently the special features of each problem. Based on recent theoretical studies of numerical analysis such a strategy leads to a splitting time step which is restricted by neither the fastest scales in the source term nor by stability constraints of the diffusive steps but only by the physics of the phenomenon. We aim thus at solving complete models including all time and space scales within a prescribed accuracy, considering large simulation domains with conventional computing resources. The efficiency is evaluated through the numerical simulation of configurations which were so far out of reach of standard methods in the field of nonlinear chemical dynamics for two-dimensional spiral waves and three-dimensional scroll waves, as an illustration. Future extensions of the proposed strategy to more complex configurations involving other physical phenomena as well as optimization capability on new computer architectures are discussed.