Analysis and applications of the exponential time differencing schemes and their contour integration modifications

We study in this paper the exponential time differencing (ETD) schemes and their modifications via complex contour integrations for the numerical solutions of parabolic type equations. We illustrate that the contour integration shares an added advantage of improving the stability of the time integration. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the ETD type schemes through the numerical solution of a typical problem in phase field modeling and through the comparisons with other existing methods.