A new stable,explicit, and generic third-order method for simulating conductive heat transfer

In this paper we introduce a new type of explicit numerical algorithm to solve the spatially discretized linear heat or diffusion equation. After discretizing the space variables as in standard finite difference methods, this novel method does not approximate the time derivatives by finite differences, but use three stage constant-neighbor and linear neighbor approximations to decouple the ordinary differential equations and solve them analytically. In the final expression for the new values of the variable, the time step size appears not in polynomial or rational, but in exponential form with negative coefficients, which can guarantee unconditional stability. The scheme contains a free parameter p. We show that the convergence of the method is third-order in the time step size regardless of the values of p, and, according to von Neumann stability analysis, the method is stable for a wide range of p. We validate the new method by testing the results in a case where the analytical solution exists, then we demonstrate the competitiveness by comparing its performance with several other numerical solvers.