Structure-preserving numerical method for Maxwell-Amp\`{e}re Nernst-Planck model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structure-preserving numerical method for the Maxwell-Ampère Nernst-Planck model that accurately captures charge dynamics while maintaining physical properties like positivity, mass conservation, and energy dissipation.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel, positivity-preserving, and energy-dissipating numerical scheme for the MANP model, incorporating a local relaxation algorithm for the dielectric displacement.

Findings

The scheme unconditionally preserves mass and positivity.

It satisfies a discrete energy dissipation law.

Numerical experiments confirm accuracy and structure-preserving properties.

Abstract

Charge dynamics play essential role in many practical applications such as semiconductors, electrochemical devices and transmembrane ion channels. A Maxwell-Amp\`{e}re Nernst-Planck (MANP) model that describes charge dynamics via concentrations and the electric displacement is able to take effects beyond mean-field approximations into account. To obtain physically faithful numerical solutions, we develop a structure-preserving numerical method for the MANP model whose solution has several physical properties of importance. By the Slotboom transform with entropic-mean approximations, a positivity preserving scheme with Scharfetter-Gummel fluxes is derived for the generalized Nernst-Planck equations. To deal with the curl-free constraint, the dielectric displacement from the Maxwell-Amp\`{e}re equation is further updated with a local relaxation algorithm of linear computational complexity. We prove that the proposed numerical method unconditionally preserves the mass conservation and the solution positivity at the discrete level, and satisfies the discrete energy dissipation law with a time-step restriction. Numerical experiments verify that our numerical method has expected accuracy and structure-preserving properties. Applications to ion transport with large convection, arising from boundary-layer electric field and Born solvation interactions, further demonstrate that the MANP formulation with the proposed numerical scheme has attractive performance and can effectively describe charge dynamics with large convection of high numerical cell P\'{e}clet numbers.