A Decreasing Upper Bound of the Energy for Time-Fractional Phase-Field Equations

In this article,we study the energy dissipation property of time-fractional Allen–Cahn equation.On the continuous level,we propose an upper bound of energy that decreases with respect to time and coincides with the original energy at t=0 and as t tends to∞.This upper bound can also be viewed as a nonlocal-in-time modified energy which is the summation of the original energy and an accumulation term due to the memory effect of time-fractional derivative.In particular,the decrease of the modified energy indicates that the original energy indeed decays w.r.t.time in a small neighborhood at t=0.We illustrate the theory mainly with the time-fractional Allen-Cahn equation but it could also be applied to other time-fractional phase-field models such as the Cahn-Hilliard equation.On the discrete level,the decreasing upper bound of energy is useful for proving energy dissipation of numerical schemes.First-order L1 and second-order L2 schemes for the time-fractional Allen-Cahn equation have similar decreasing modified energies,so that stability can be established.Some numerical results are provided to illustrate the behavior of this modified energy and to verify our theoretical results.