Stabilized exponential time differencing schemes for the convective Allen-Cahn equation

TL;DR

This paper introduces stabilized exponential time differencing schemes for the convective Allen-Cahn equation that unconditionally preserve the maximum bound principle, ensuring stable and accurate simulations of multi-phase flows.

Contribution

The paper develops first- and second-order ETD schemes with linear stabilization that guarantee unconditional MBP preservation for the convective Allen-Cahn equation.

Findings

Unconditionally preserve the maximum bound principle.

Proven convergence of the proposed schemes.

Numerical experiments confirm theoretical results.

Abstract

The convective Allen-Cahn equation has been widely used to simulate multi-phase flows in many phase-field models. As a generalized form of the classic Allen-Cahn equation, the convective Allen-Cahn equation still preserves the maximum bound principle (MBP) in the sense that the time-dependent solution of the equation with appropriate initial and boundary conditions preserves for all time a uniform pointwise bound in absolute value. In this paper, we develop efficient first- and second-order exponential time differencing (ETD) schemes combined with the linear stabilizing technique to preserve the MBP unconditionally in the discrete setting. The space discretization is done using the upwind difference scheme for the convective term and the central difference scheme for the diffusion term, and both the mobility and nonlinear terms are approximated through the linear convex interpolation. The unconditional preservation of the MBP of the proposed schemes is proven, and their convergence analysis is presented. Various numerical experiments in two and three dimensions are also carried out to verify the theoretical results.