In this paper we present and analyze finite difference numerical schemes for the Allen Cahn/Cahn-Hilliard equation with a logarithmic Flory Huggins energy potential. Both the first order and second order accurate temporal algorithms are considered. In the first order scheme, we treat the nonlinear logarithmic terms and the surface diffusion term implicitly, and update the linear expansive term and the mobility explicitly. We provide a theoretical justification that, this numerical algorithm has a unique solution such that the positivity is always preserved for the logarithmic arguments, i.e., the phase variable is always between −1 and 1, at a point-wise level. In particular, our analysis reveals a subtle fact: the singular nature of the logarithmic term around the values of −1 and 1 prevents the numerical solution reaching these singular values, so that the numerical scheme is always well-defined as long as the numerical solution stays similarly bounded at the previous time step. Furthermore, an unconditional energy stability of the numerical scheme is derived, without any restriction for the time step size. Such an analysis technique could also be applied to a second order numerical scheme, in which the BDF temporal stencil is applied, the expansive term is updated by a second order Adams-Bashforth explicit extrapolation formula, and an artificial Douglas-Dupont regularization term is added to improve the stability property. The unique solvability and the positivity-preserving property for the second order scheme are proved using similar ideas, in which the singular nature of the logarithmic term plays an essential role. For both the first and second order accurate schemes, we are able to derive an optimal rate convergence analysis, which gives the full order error estimate. The case with a non-constant mobility is analyzed as well. We also describe a practical and efficient multigrid solver for the proposed numerical schemes, and present some numerical results, which demonstrate the robustness of the numerical schemes.

We present a linear numerical scheme for a model of epitaxial thin film growth without slope selection. The PDE, which is a nonlinear, fourth-order parabolic equation, is the L 2 gradient flow of the energy (− 1 2 ln(1 + |∇φ| 2 ) + 2 2 | φ(x)| 2 ) dx. The idea of convex-concave decomposition of the energy functional is applied, which results in a numerical scheme that is unconditionally energy stable, i.e., energy dissipative. The particular decomposition used here places the nonlinear term in the concave part of the energy, in contrast to a previous convexity splitting scheme. As a result, the numerical scheme is fully linear at each time step and unconditionally solvable. Collocation Fourier spectral differentiation is used in the spatial discretization, and the unconditional energy stability is established in the fully discrete setting using a detailed energy estimate. We present numerical simulation results for a sequence of values ranging from 0.02 to 0.1. In particular, the long time simulations show the − log(t) decay law for the energy and the t 1/2 growth law for the surface roughness, in agreement with theoretical analysis and experimental/numerical observations in earlier works.

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We describe and analyze preconditioned steepest descent (PSD) solvers for fourth and sixthorder nonlinear elliptic equations that include p-Laplacian terms on periodic domains in 2 and 3 dimensions. The highest and lowest order terms of the equations are constant-coefficient, positive linear operators, which suggests a natural preconditioning strategy. Such nonlinear elliptic equations often arise from time discretization of parabolic equations that model various biological and physical phenomena, in particular, liquid crystals, thin film epitaxial growth and phase transformations. The analyses of the schemes involve the characterization of the strictly convex energies associated with the equations. We first give a general framework for PSD in generic Hilbert spaces. Based on certain reasonable assumptions of the linear pre-conditioner, a geometric convergence rate is shown for the nonlinear PSD iteration. We then apply the general the theory to the fourth and sixth-order problems of interest, making use of Sobolev embedding and regularity results to confirm the appropriateness of our pre-conditioners for the regularized p-Lapacian problems. Our results include a sharper theoretical convergence result for p-Laplacian systems compared to what may be found in existing works. We demonstrate rigorously how to apply the theory in the finite dimensional setting using finite difference discretization methods. Numerical simulations for some important physical application problems -including thin film epitaxy with slope selection and the square phase field crystal model -are carried out to verify the efficiency of the scheme.