Stochastic Exponential Integrators for a Finite Element Discretization of SPDEs

Abstract: We consider the numerical approximation of general semilinear parabolic stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) driven by additive space-time noise. In contrast to the standard time stepping methods which uses basic increments of the noise and the approximation of the exponential function by a rational fraction, we introduce a new scheme, designed for finite elements, finite volumes or finite differences space discretization, similar to the schemes in \cite{Jentzen3,Jentzen4} for spectral methods and \cite{GTambue} for finite element methods. We use the projection operator, the smoothing effect of the positive definite self-adjoint operator and linear functionals of the noise in Fourier space to obtain higher order approximations. We consider noise that is white in time and either in $H<sup>1$ or $H<sup>2$ in space and give convergence proofs in the mean square $L<sup>{2}$ norm for a diffusion reaction equation and in mean square $H<sup>{1}$ norm in the presence of an advection term. For the exponential integrator we rely on computing the exponential of a non-diagonal matrix. In our numerical results we use two different efficient techniques: the real fast \Leja points and Krylov subspace techniques. We present results for a linear reaction diffusion equation in two dimensions as well as a nonlinear example of two-dimensional stochastic advection diffusion reaction equation motivated from realistic porous media flow.