Unconditionally energy stable fully discrete schemes for a chemo-repulsion model

TL;DR

This paper develops three unconditionally energy stable and mass-conservative finite element schemes for a chemotaxis model, ensuring well-posedness and demonstrating their effectiveness through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces three novel fully discrete FE schemes for a chemotaxis model, including nonlinear and linear approaches with energy stability and mass conservation.

Findings

All schemes are unconditionally energy stable.

Existence of solutions is unconditionally proven; uniqueness is conditionally established.

Numerical simulations compare scheme behaviors effectively.

Abstract

This work is devoted to study unconditionally energy stable and mass-conservative numerical schemes for the following repulsive-productive chemotaxis model: Find $u \geq 0$, the cell density, and $v \geq 0$, the chemical concentration, such that $$ \left\{ \begin{array} [c]{lll} \partial_t u - \Delta u - \nabla\cdot (u\nabla v)=0 \ \ \mbox{in}\ \Omega,\ t>0,\\ \partial_t v - \Delta v + v = u \ \ \mbox{in}\ \Omega,\ t>0, \end{array} \right. $$ in a bounded domain $\Omega\subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$, $d=2,3$. By using a regularization technique, we propose three fully discrete Finite Element (FE) approximations. The first one is a nonlinear approximation in the variables $(u,v)$; the second one is another nonlinear approximation obtained by introducing ${\boldsymbol\sigma}=\nabla v$ as an auxiliary variable; and the third one is a linear approximation constructed by mixing the regularization procedure with the energy quadratization technique, in which other auxiliary variables are introduced. In addition, we study the well-posedness of the numerical schemes, proving unconditional existence of solution, but conditional uniqueness (for the nonlinear schemes). Finally, we compare the behavior of such schemes throughout several numerical simulations and provide some conclusions.