Open Access

Martin Weiser, Simone Scacchi

• We investigate spectral deferred correction (SDC) methods for time stepping and their interplay with spatio-temporal adaptivity, applied to the solution of the cardiac electro-mechanical coupling model. This model consists of the Monodomain equations, a reaction-diffusion system modeling the cardiac bioelectrical activity, coupled with a quasi-static mechanical model describing the contraction and relaxation of the cardiac muscle. The numerical approximation of the cardiac electro-mechanical coupling is a challenging multiphysics problem, because it exhibits very different spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, spatio-temporal adaptivity is a promising approach to reduce the computational complexity. SDC methods are simple iterative methods for solving collocation systems. We exploit their flexibility for combining them in various ways with spatio-temporal adaptivity. The accuracy and computational complexity of the resulting methods are studied on some numerical examples.