Explicit Time-Stepping for Stiff ODEs

Abstract: We present a new strategy for solving stiff ODEs with explicit methods. By adaptively taking a small number of stabilizing small explicit time steps when necessary, a stiff ODE system can be stabilized enough to allow for time steps much larger than what is indicated by classical stability analysis. For many stiff problems the cost of the stabilizing small time steps is small, so the improvement is large. We illustrate the technique on a number of well-known stiff test problems.