TY - JOUR T1 - Unconditional Bound-Preserving and Energy-Dissipating Finite-Volume Schemes for the Cahn-Hilliard Equation AU - Bailo , Rafael AU - Carrillo , José A. AU - Kalliadasis , Serafim AU - Perez , Sergio P. JO - Communications in Computational Physics VL - 3 SP - 713 EP - 748 PY - 2023 DA - 2023/10 SN - 34 DO - http://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.OA-2023-0049 UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/cicp/22022.html KW - Cahn-Hilliard equation, diffuse interface theory, gradient flow, finite-volume method, bound preservation, energy dissipation. AB -

We propose finite-volume schemes for the Cahn-Hilliard equation which unconditionally and discretely preserve the boundedness of the phase field and the dissipation of the free energy. Our numerical framework is applicable to a variety of free-energy potentials, including Ginzburg-Landau and Flory-Huggins, to general wetting boundary conditions, and to degenerate mobilities. Its central thrust is the upwind methodology, which we combine with a semi-implicit formulation for the free-energy terms based on the classical convex-splitting approach. The extension of the schemes to an arbitrary number of dimensions is straightforward thanks to their dimensionally split nature, which allows to efficiently solve higher-dimensional problems with a simple parallelisation. The numerical schemes are validated and tested through a variety of examples, in different dimensions, and with various contact angles between droplets and substrates.