We provide a detailed mathematical analysis of a model for phase separation on biological membranes which was recently proposed by Garcke, Rätz, Röger and the second author. The model is an extended Cahn–Hilliard equation which contains additional terms to account for the active transport processes. We prove results on the existence and regularity of solutions, their long-time behaviour, and on the existence of stationary solutions. Moreover, we investigate two different asymptotic regimes. We study the case of large cytosolic diffusion and investigate the effect of an infinitely large affinity between membrane components. The first case leads to the reduction of coupled bulk-surface equations in the model to a system of surface equations with non-local contributions. Subsequently, we recover a variant of the well-known Ohta–Kawasaki equation as the limit for infinitely large affinity between membrane components.

It is known that large time-stepping method are useful for simulating phase field models. In this work, an adaptive time-stepping strategy is proposed based on numerical energy stability and equi-distribution principle. The main idea is to use the energy variation as an indicator to update the time step, so that the resulting algorithm is free of user-defined parameters, which is different from several existing approaches. Some numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithms.

In the first part, we study the convergence of discrete solutions to splitting schemes for two-phase flow with different mass densities suggested in [Guillen-Gonzalez, Tierra, J.Comput.Math. (6)2014]. They have been formulated for the diffuse interface model in [Abels, Garcke, Grün, M3AS, 2012, DOI:10.1142/S0218202511500138] which is consistent with thermodynamics. Our technique covers various discretization methods for phase-field energies, ranging from convex-concave splitting to difference quotient approaches for the double-well potential. In the second part of the paper, numerical experiments are presented in two space dimensions to identify discretizations of Cahn-Hilliard energies which are ϕ-stable and which do not reduce the acceleration of falling droplets. Finally, 3d simulations in axial symmetric geometries are shown to underline even more the full practicality of the approach.

A two-grid method for solving the Cahn-Hilliard equation is proposed in this paper. This two-grid method consists of two steps. First, solve the Cahn-Hilliard equation with an implicit mixed finite element method on a coarse grid. Second, solve two Poisson equations using multigrid methods on a fine grid. This two-grid method can also be combined with local mesh refinement to further improve the efficiency. Numerical results including two and three dimensional cases with linear or quadratic elements show that this two-grid method can speed up the existing mixed finite method while keeping the same convergence rate.

An existing phase-fieldmodel of two immiscible fluids with a single soluble surfactant present is discussed in detail. We analyze the well-posedness of the model and provide strong evidence that it is mathematically ill-posed for a large set of physically relevant parameters. As a consequence, critical modifications to the model are suggested that substantially increase the domain of validity. Carefully designed numerical simulations offer informative demonstrations as to the sharpness of our theoretical results and the qualities of the physical model. A fully coupled hydrodynamic test-case demonstrates the potential to capture also non-trivial effects on the overall flow.

We present an unconditionally energy stable and uniquely solvable finite difference scheme for the Cahn-Hilliard-Brinkman (CHB) system, which is comprised of a Cahn-Hilliard-type diffusion equation and a generalized Brinkman equation mod-eling fluid flow. The CHB system is a generalization of the Cahn-Hilliard-Stokes model and describes two phase very viscous flows in porous media. The scheme is based on a convex splitting of the discrete CH energy and is semi-implicit. The equations at the implicit time level are nonlinear, but we prove that they represent the gradient of a strictly convex functional and are therefore uniquely solvable, regardless of time step size. Owing to energy stability, we show that the scheme is stable in the time and space discrete and norms. We also present an efficient, practical nonlinear multigrid method . comprised of a standard FAS method for the Cahn-Hilliard part, and a method based on the Vanka smoothing strategy for the Brinkman part . for solving these equations. In particular, we provide evidence that the solver has nearly optimal complexity in typical situations. The solver is applied to simulate spinodal decomposition of a viscous fluid in a porous medium, as well as to the more general problems of buoyancy- and boundary-driven flows.

In this paper, stabilized Crank-Nicolson/Adams-Bashforth schemes are presented for the Allen-Cahn and Cahn-Hilliard equations. It is shown that the proposed time discretization schemes are either unconditionally energy stable, or conditionally energy stable under some reasonable stability conditions. Optimal error estimates for the semi-discrete schemes and fully-discrete schemes will be derived. Numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the theoretical results.

This paper studies the numerical simulations for the Cahn-Hilliard equation which describes a phase separation phenomenon. The numerical simulation of the Cahn-Hilliard model needs very long time to reach the steady state, and therefore large time-stepping methods become useful. The main objective of this work is to construct the unconditionally energy stable finite difference scheme so that the large time steps can be used in the numerical simulations. The equation is discretized by the central difference scheme in space and fully implicit second-order scheme in time. The proposed scheme is proved to be unconditionally energy stable and mass-conservative. An error estimate for the numerical solution is also obtained with second order in both space and time. By using this energy stable scheme, an adaptive time-stepping strategy is proposed, which selects time steps adaptively based on the variation of the free energy against time. The numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the adaptive time-stepping approach.

We study the biofilm-flow interaction resulting in biofilm growth and deformation in a water channel in a 3-D setting using the phase field model developed recently. In this biofilm model, the biofilm made up of the EPS, bacteria and solvent is tracked using a biofilm volume fraction which vanishes outside the biofilm region. The interface between the biofilm and the solvent is marked by the zero level surface of the volume fraction measured from the biofilm to the solvent. The growth of the biofilm and the solvent-biofilm interaction with the top nutrient feeding condition is simulated in the viscous regime (growth regime) of the biofilm-solvent mixture flow. In quiescent flows, the model predicts growth patterns consistent with experimental findings for single or multiple adjacent biofilm colonies, in which the known mushroom shape growth pattern is obtained. Shear induced deformation in biofilms is simulated in a shear cell, providing a viable numerical evidence for using simulation tool to study biofilm growth and interaction dynamics in aqueous environment.

The Cahn-Hilliard variational inequality is a non-standard parabolic variational inequality of fourth order for which straightforward numerical approaches cannot be applied. We propose a primal-dual active set method which can be interpreted as a semi-smooth Newton method as solution technique for the discretized Cahn-Hilliard variational inequality. A (semi-)implicit Euler discretization is used in time and a piecewise linear finite element discretization of splitting type is used in space leading to a discrete variational inequality of saddle point type in each time step. In each iteration of the primal-dual active set method a linearized system resulting from the discretization of two coupled elliptic equations which are defined on different sets has to be solved. We show local convergence of the primal-dual active set method and demonstrate its efficiency with several numerical simulations.

We derive in this article some models ofCahn-Hilliard equations in nonisotropic media. These models, based onconstitutive equations introduced by Gurtin in [19], take the work ofinternal microforces and also the deformations of the material intoaccount. We then study the existence and uniqueness of solutions andobtain the existence of finite dimensional attractors.