The present article is concerned with the Lyapunov stability of stationary solutions to the Allen–Cahn equation with a strong irreversibility constraint, which was first intensively studied in [2] and can be reduced to an evolutionary variational inequality of obstacle type. As a feature of the obstacle problem, the set of stationary solutions always includes accumulation points, and hence, it is rather delicate to determine the stability of such non-isolated equilibria. Furthermore, the strongly irreversible Allen–Cahn equation can also be regarded as a (generalized) gradient flow; however, standard techniques for gradient flows such as linearization and Łojasiewicz–Simon gradient inequalities are not available for determining the stability of stationary solutions to the strongly irreversible Allen–Cahn equation due to the non-smooth nature of the obstacle problem.

In this paper, we propose a multigrid algorithm based on the full approximate scheme for solving the membrane constrained obstacle problems and the minimal surface obstacle problems in the formulations of HJB equations. A Newton-Gauss-Seidel (NGS) method is used as smoother. A Galerkin coarse grid operator is proposed for the membrane constrained obstacle problem. Comparing with standard FAS with the direct discretization coarse grid operator, the FAS with the proposed operator converges faster. A special prolongation operator is used to interpolate functions accurately from the coarse grid to the fine grid at the boundary between the active and inactive sets. We will demonstrate the fast convergence of the proposed multigrid method for solving two model obstacle problems and compare the results with other multigrid methods.

In this paper we are interested in bilateral obstacle problems for quasilinear scalar conservation laws associated with Dirichlet boundary conditions. Firstly, we provide a suitable entropy formulation which ensures uniqueness. Then, we justify the existence of a solution through the method of penalization and by referring to the notion of entropy process solution due to specific properties of bounded sequences in L ∞. Lastly, we study the behaviour of this solution and its stability properties with respect to the associated obstacle functions.