A conservative numerical method for the Cahn-Hilliard equation with generalized mobilities on curved surfaces in three-dimensional space

Darae Jeong, Yibao Li, Chaeyoung Lee, Junxiang Yang, Junseok Kim

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a conservative numerical method for the Cahn-Hilliard equation with generalized mobilities on curved surfaces in three-dimensional space. We use an unconditionally gradient stable nonlinear splitting numerical scheme and solve the resulting system of implicit discrete equations on a discrete narrow band domain by using a Jacobi-type iteration. For the domain boundary cells, we use the trilinear interpolation using the closest point method. The proposing numerical algorithm is computationally efficient because we can use the standard finite difference Laplacian scheme on three-dimensional Cartesian narrow band mesh instead of discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator on triangulated curved surfaces. In particular, we employ a mass conserving correction scheme, which enforces conservation of total mass. We perform numerical experiments on the various curved surfaces such as sphere, torus, bunny, cube, and cylinder to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method. We also present the dynamics of the CH equation with constant and space-dependent mobilities on the curved surfaces.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)412-430
Number of pages19
JournalCommunications in Computational Physics
Volume27
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Cahn-Hilliard equation
  • Closest point method
  • Mass correction scheme
  • Narrow band domain

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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