A free–energy stable nodal discontinuous Galerkin approximation with summation–by–parts property for the Cahn–Hilliard equation

Abstract

We present a nodal Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme for the Cahn–Hilliard equation that satisfies the summation–by–parts simultaneous–approximation–term (SBP–SAT) property. The latter permits us to show that the discrete free–energy is bounded, and as a result, the scheme is provably stable. The scheme and the stability proof are presented for general curvilinear three–dimensional hexahedral meshes. We use the Bassi–Rebay 1 (BR1) scheme to compute interface fluxes, and a first order IMplicit–EXplicit (IMEX) scheme to integrate in time. We provide a semi–discrete stability study, and a fully–discrete proof subject to a positivity condition on the solution. Lastly, we test the theoretical findings using numerical cases that include two and three–dimensional problems.