Efficient time stepping algorithms are crucial for accurate long time simulations of nonlinear waves. In particular, adaptive time stepping combined with an integrating factor are known to be very effective. We propose a modification of the existing technique. The trick consists in subtracting a certain-order polynomial to a PDE. Then, like for the integrating factor, a change of variables is performed to remove the linear part. But, here, we hope to remove something more to make the PDE less stiff to numerical resolution. The polynomial is chosen as a Taylor expansion around the initial time of the solution. In order to calculate the different derivatives, we use a dense output which gives a possibility to approximate the derivatives of the solution at any time. The modified integrating factor being applied, a classical time-stepping method can be used to solve the remaining equation. We focus on various Runge-Kutta schemes with a varying step size. We take advantage of embedded methods and use an evolved adaptive step control. We do not need to calculate new functions and loose time of calculation only by using already estimated values during the temporal evolution. Numerical tests show that the actual efficiency of the method varies along cases. For example, we verified that steeper waves profiles give rise to better behaviour of the method. For fully nonlinear water wave simulations with the HOS model, we can save up to 30% of total time steps with a Dormand-Prince Runge-Kutta scheme and we can save up to 99% with the Bogacki-Shampine scheme.
