An implementation of the exponential time differencing scheme to the magnetohydrodynamic equations in a spherical shell

Over the last decade there has been renewed interest in applying exponential time differencing (ETD) time stepping schemes to the solution of stiff systems. In this paper, we present an implementation of such a scheme to the fully spectral solution of the incompressible magnetohydrodynamic equations in a spherical shell. One problem associated with ETD schemes is the accurate calculation of the necessary matrices; we implement and discuss in detail a variety of different methods including direct computation, contour integration, spectral expansions and recurrence relations. We compare the accuracy of six different second-order methods in determining the evolution of a three-dimensional magnetic field under the action of a prescribed time-dependent flow of electrically conducting fluid, and find that for the timestep restriction imposed by the nonlinear terms, ETD methods are no more accurate than linearly implicit methods which have the significant advantage of being easier to implement. However, ETD methods are more readily extendable than those which are linearly implicit and will become much more advantageous at higher order.