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

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    16 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

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    The authors thank the reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on the revision of this article. The first author (D. Jeong) was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (NRF-2017R1E1A1A03070953). Y.B. Li is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.11601416, No.11631012). The corresponding author (J.S. Kim) was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2016R1D1A1B03933243).

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2020 Global-Science Press.

    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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