A unified framework for original energy dissipation of equilibrium-preserving exponential Runge--Kutta methods for $L^2$ gradient flows

This paper develops a unified framework for establishing original energy dissipation of equilibrium-preserving exponential time differencing Runge–Kutta (ETDRK) methods for $L^2$ gradient flows. The analysis is based on an auxiliary continuous evolution representation of a general ETDRK method, which allows the energy variation to be controlled without imposing positive-definiteness conditions on the Butcher coefficients or introducing stabilization terms. For a broad class of equilibrium-preserving ETDRK schemes, we derive an explicitly computable time-step restriction. Explicit restrictions are obtained for representative schemes of orders two through five, and the framework also applies to arbitrarily high-order interpolation-based ETDRK methods. For the latter class, the resulting admissible step sizes are substantially larger than those obtained from the previous interpolation-specific analysis. Numerical experiments for the Allen–Cahn equation confirm the theoretical dissipation restrictions.