Fourth-Order Energy-Consistent Average Vector Field Discrete Gradient Methods for Dissipative Hamiltonian Systems

Discrete gradient methods provide a structure-preserving approach to energy-consistent time integration of dissipative Hamiltonian systems. In their conventional formulation, however, they generally attain at most second-order convergence. Extending the perturbation principle previously developed for Poisson systems to the dissipative setting, we derive fourth-order average vector field discrete gradient schemes. A congruence-based completion preserves the positive semi-definiteness of the dissipation matrix, thereby guaranteeing unconditional energy dissipativity for all positive step sizes. This completion concept provides a systematic route to higher-order energy-consistent schemes. For purely dissipative systems, an alternative exponential completion is derived, together with structure-preserving rational approximations. In particular, we characterize Pad\'e approximants that preserve positive semi-definiteness and can be incorporated into energy-associated splitting schemes. Numerical experiments on a damped physical pendulum and a dissipative Fermi--Pasta--Ulam system demonstrate the importance of the positive semi-definite completion for avoiding nonphysical numerical instabilities and capturing the correct qualitative dynamics. They further show that the proposed methods achieve the desired accuracy and energy consistency at a computational cost competitive with existing Galerkin-type approaches. Moreover, the fourth-order schemes outperform the conventional second-order discrete gradient method in computational efficiency over the considered accuracy range, despite their higher per-step cost.