An unconditionally gradient stable adaptive mesh refinement for the Cahn-Hilliard equation

Abstract

We consider a numerical method, the so-called an unconditionally gradient stable adaptive mesh refinement scheme, for solving the Cahn-Hilliard equation representing a model of phase separation in a binary mixture. The continuous problem has a decreasing total energy. We show the same property for the corresponding discrete problem by using eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix of the energy functional. An unconditionally gradient stable time discretization is used to remove the high-order time-step constraints. An adaptive mesh refinement is used to highly resolve narrow interfacial layers.