A parametric finite element method for solid-state dewetting problems in three dimensions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parametric finite element method for simulating the 3D morphological evolution of solid-state dewetting of thin films, combining a sharp-interface model with efficient numerical techniques.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel PFEM approach for 3D solid-state dewetting, including a variational formulation and analysis of well-posedness, advancing computational modeling in this area.

Findings

Demonstrates high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed PFEM.

Shows complex dewetting morphologies consistent with experimental observations.

Provides a stable numerical scheme with proven well-posedness.

Abstract

We propose a parametric finite element method (PFEM) for efficiently solving the morphological evolution of solid-state dewetting of thin films on a flat rigid substrate in three dimensions (3D). The interface evolution of the dewetting problem in 3D is described by a sharp-interface model, which includes surface diffusion coupled with contact line migration. A variational formulation of the sharp-interface model is presented, and a PFEM is proposed for spatial discretization. For temporal discretization, at each time step, we first update the position of the contact line according to the relaxed contact angle condition; then, by using the position of the new contact line as the boundary condition, we solve a linear algebra system resulted from the discretization of PFEM to obtain the new interface surface for the next step. The well-posedness of the solution of the PFEM is also established. Extensive numerical results are reported to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed PFEM and to show the complexities of the dewetting morphology evolution observed in solid-state dewetting experiments.