Constructing Polynomial Block Methods

The recently introduced polynomial time integration framework proposes a novel way to construct time integrators for solving systems of first-order ordinary differential equation by using interpolating polynomials in the complex time plane. In this work we continue to develop the framework by introducing several additional types of polynomials and proposing a general class of construction strategies for polynomial block methods with imaginary nodes. The new construction strategies do not involve algebraic order conditions and are instead motivated by geometric arguments similar to those used for constructing traditional spatial finite differences. Moreover, the newly proposed methods address several shortcomings of previously introduced polynomial block methods including the ability to solve dispersive equations and the lack of efficient serial methods when parallelism cannot be used. To validate our new methods, we conduct two numerical experiments that compare the performance of polynomial block methods against backward difference methods and implicit Runge-Kutta schemes.