Unconditionally maximum principle-preserving linear method for a mass-conserved Allen–Cahn model with local Lagrange multiplier

In this work, we present a conservative Allen–Cahn (CAC) equation and investigate its unconditionally maximum principle-preserving linear numerical scheme. The operator splitting strategy is adopted to split the CAC model into a conventional AC equation and a mass correction equation. The standard finite difference method is used to discretize the equations in space. In the first step, the temporal discretization of the AC equation is performed by using the energy factorization technique. The discrete version of the maximum principle-preserving property for the AC equation is unconditionally satisfied. In the second step, we apply mass correction by using an explicit Euler-type approach. Without the constraint of time step, we estimate that the absolute value of the updated solution is bounded by 1. The unique solvability is analytically proved. In each time step, the proposed method is easy to implement because we only need to solve a linear elliptic type equation and then correct the solution in an explicit manner. Various computational experiments in two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces are performed to confirm the performance of the proposed method. Moreover, the experiments also indicate that the proposed model can be used to simulate two-phase incompressible fluid flows.