A weakly nonlinear, energy stable scheme for the strongly anisotropic Cahn-Hilliard equation and its convergence analysis

Abstract

In this paper we propose and analyze a weakly nonlinear, energy stable numerical scheme for the strongly anisotropic Cahn-Hilliard model. In particular, a highly nonlinear and singular anisotropic surface energy makes the PDE system very challenging at both the analytical and numerical levels. To overcome this well-known difficulty, we perform a convexity analysis on the anisotropic interfacial energy, and a careful estimate reveals that all its second order functional derivatives stay uniformly bounded by a global constant. This subtle fact enables one to derive an energy stable numerical scheme. Moreover, a linear approximation becomes available for the surface energy part, and a detailed estimate demonstrates the corresponding energy stability. Its combination with an appropriate treatment for the nonlinear double well potential terms leads to a weakly nonlinear, energy stable scheme for the whole system. In particular, such an energy stability is in terms of the interfacial energy with respect to the original phase variable, and no auxiliary variable needs to be introduced. This has important implications, for example, in the case that the method needs to satisfy a maximum principle. More importantly, with a careful application of the global bound for the second order functional derivatives, an optimal rate convergence analysis becomes available for the proposed numerical scheme, which is the first such result in this area. Meanwhile, for a Cahn-Hilliard system with a sufficiently large degree of anisotropy, a Willmore or biharmonic regularization has to be introduced to make the equation well-posed. For such a physical model, all the presented analyses are still available; the unique solvability, energy stability and convergence estimate can be derived in an appropriate manner. In addition, the Fourier pseudo-spectral spatial approximation is applied, and all the theoretical results could be extended for the fully discrete scheme. Finally, a few numerical results are presented, which confirm the robustness and accuracy of the proposed scheme.