Numerical treatment of special second order ordinary differential equations: general and exponentially fitted methods

The aim of this research is the construction and the analysis of new families of numerical methods for the integration of special second order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). The modeling of continuous time dynamical systems using second order ODEs is widely used in many elds of applications, as celestial mechanics, seismology, molecular dynamics, or in the semidiscretisation of partial differential equations (which leads to high dimensional systems and stiffness). Although the numerical treatment of this problem has been widely discussed in the literature, the interest in this area is still vivid, because such equations generally exhibit typical problems (e.g. stiffness, metastability, periodicity, high oscillations), which must efficiently be overcome by using suitable numerical integrators. The purpose of this research is twofold: on the one hand to construct a general family of numerical methods for special second order ODEs of the type y00 = f(y(t)), in order to provide an unifying approach for the analysis of the properties of consistency, zero-stability and convergence; on the other hand to derive special purpose methods, that follow the oscillatory or periodic behaviour of the solution of the problem...[edited by author]