New Paper ‘Issues with positivity-preserving Patankar-type schemes’ published in Applied Numerical Mathematics

The paper Issues with positivity-preserving Patankar-type schemes of Davide Torlo, Philipp Öffner, and me has been published in Applied Numerical Mathematics.

Patankar-type schemes are linearly implicit time integration methods designed to be unconditionally positivity-preserving. However, there are only little results on their stability or robustness. We suggest two approaches to analyze the performance and robustness of these methods. In particular, we demonstrate problematic behaviors of these methods that, even on very simple linear problems, can lead to undesired oscillations and order reduction for vanishing initial condition. Finally, we demonstrate in numerical simulations that our theoretical results for linear problems apply analogously to nonlinear stiff problems.

As usual, you can find the preprint on arXiv. The reproducibility repository is available online.