A novel decoupled and stable scheme for an anisotropic phase-field dendritic crystal growth model

Abstract

We consider numerical approximations for a phase-field dendritic crystal growth model, which is a highly nonlinear system that couples the anisotropic Allen–Cahn type equation and the heat equation. By combining the stabilized-Invariant Energy Quadratization method with a novel decoupling technique, the scheme requires solving only a sequence of linear elliptic equations at each time step, making it the first, to the best of the author’s knowledge, totally decoupled, linear, unconditionally energy stable scheme for the model. We further prove the unconditional energy stability rigorously and present various numerical simulations to demonstrate the stability and accuracy.