Phase separation and morphology formation in interacting ternary mixtures under evaporation: Well-posedness and numerical simulation of a non-local evolution system

Abstract

We study a nonlinear coupled parabolic system with non-local drift terms modeling at the continuum level the inter-species interaction within a ternary mixture that allows the evaporation of one of the species. In the absence of evaporation, the proposed system coincides with the hydrodynamic limit of a stochastic interacting particle system of Blume–Capel-type driven by the Kawasaki dynamics. Similar governing dynamics are found in models used to study morphology formation in the design of organic solar cells, thin adhesive bands, and other applications. We investigate the well-posedness of the target system and present preliminary numerical simulations which incorporate ‘from the top’ evaporation into the model. We employ a finite volumes scheme to construct approximations of the weak solution and illustrate how the evaporation process can affect the shape and connectivity of the evolving-in-time morphologies.