Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2011
In this paper, we investigate the coupling between operator splitting techniques and a timeparallelization scheme, the parareal algorithm,as a numericalstrategy for the simulation of reaction-diffusion equations modelling multi-scale reaction waves. This type of problems 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 large spatial gradients in the reactive fronts,spatially very localized.In a series of previous studies, the numerical analysis of theoperator splitting as well as the parareal algorithmhas been conducted and such approaches have shown a great potential in the framework of reaction-diffusion and convection-diffusion-reaction systems. However, complementary studies are needed for a more complete characterizationof such techniques for these stiff configurations.Therefore,we conduct in this work a precise numerical analysis that considers thecombination of time operator splitting and the parareal algorithmin the context of stiff reaction fronts. The impact of the stiffness featured by these frontson the convergence of the method is thus quantified, and allows to conclude on an optimal strategy for the resolution ofsuch problems.We finally perform some numerical simulations in the field of nonlinear chemical dynamics that validate the theoretical estimatesand examine the performance of such strategiesin the context of academical one-dimensional test casesas well as multi-dimensional configurationssimulated on parallel architecture.