ON THE STABILITY OF UNCONDITIONALLY POSITIVE AND LINEAR INVARIANTS PRESERVING TIME INTEGRATION SCHEMES

Higher-order time integration methods that unconditionally preserve the positivity and linear invariants of the underlying differential equation system cannot belong to the class of general linear methods. This poses a major challenge for the stability analysis of such methods since the new iterate depends nonlinearly on the current iterate. Moreover, for linear systems, the existence of linear invariants is always associated with zero eigenvalues, so that steady states of the continuous problem become nonhyperbolic fixed points of the numerical time integration scheme. Altogether, the stability analysis of such methods requires the investigation of nonhyperbolic fixed points for general nonlinear iterations. Based on the center manifold theory for maps we present a theorem for the analysis of the stability of nonhyperbolic fixed points of time integration schemes applied to problems whose steady states form a subspace. This theorem provides sufficient conditions for both the stability of the method and the local convergence of the iterates to the steady state of the underlying initial value problem. This theorem is then used to prove the unconditional stability of the MPRK22(α)-family of modified Patankar–Runge–Kutta schemes when applied to arbitrary positive and conservative linear systems of differential equations. The theoretical results are confirmed by numerical experiments. © 2022 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.