Convergence Analysis of the Fully Decoupled Linear Scheme for Magnetohydrodynamic Equations

In this paper, we propose a fully decoupled and linear scheme for the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equation with the backward differential formulation (BDF) and finite element method (FEM). To solve the system, we adopt a technique based on the “zero-energy-contribution” contribution, which separates the magnetic and fluid fields from the coupled system. Additionally, making use of the pressure projection methods, the pressure variable appears explicitly in the velocity field equation, and would be computed in the form of a Poisson equation. Therefore, the total system is divided into several smaller sub-systems that could be simulated at a significantly low cost. We prove the unconditional energy stability, unique solvability and optimal error estimates for the proposed scheme, and present numerical results to verify the accuracy, efficiency and stability of the scheme.

A Stable Arbitrarily High Order Time-Stepping Method for Thermal Phase Change Problems

Thermal phase change problems are widespread in mathematics,nature,and science.They are particularly useful in simulating the phenomena of melting and solidification in materials science.In this paper we propose a novel class of arbitrarily high-order and unconditionally energy stable schemes for a thermal phase changemodel,which is the coupling of a heat transfer equation and a phase field equation.The unconditional energy stability and consistency error estimates are rigorously proved for the proposed schemes.A detailed implementation demonstrates that the proposed method requires only the solution of a system of linear elliptic equations at each time step,with an efficient scheme of sufficient accuracy to calculate the solution at the first step.It is observed from the comparison with the classical explicit Runge-Kutta method that the new schemes allow to use larger time steps.Adaptive time step size strategies can be applied to further benefit from this unconditional stability.Numerical experiments are presented to verify the theoretical claims and to illustrate the accuracy and effectiveness of our method.

An SAV Method for Imaginary Time Gradient Flow Model in Density Functional Theory

In this paper,based on the imaginary time gradient flow model in the density functional theory,a scalar auxiliary variable(SAV)method is developed for the ground state calculation of a given electronic structure system.To handle the orthonormality constraint on those wave functions,two kinds of penalty terms are introduced in designing the modified energy functional in SAV,i.e.,one for the norm preserving of each wave function,another for the orthogonality between each pair of different wave functions.A numerical method consisting of a designed scheme and a linear finite element method is used for the discretization.Theoretically,the desired unconditional decay of modified energy can be obtained from our method,while computationally,both the original energy and modified energy decay behaviors can be observed successfully from a number of numerical experiments.More importantly,numerical results show that the orthonormality among those wave functions can be automatically preserved,without explicitly preserving orthogonalization operations.This implies the potential of our method in large-scale simulations in density functional theory.

A New Conservative Allen-Cahn Type Ohta-Kawaski Phase-Field Model for Diblock Copolymers and Its Numerical Approximations

We develop a new conservative Allen-Cahn phase-field model for diblock copolymers in this paper by using the Allen-Cahn type gradient flow approach for the classical Ohta-Kawaski free energy.The change in volume fraction of two composing monomers is eliminated by using a nonlocal Lagrange multiplier.Based on the recently developed stabilized Scalar Auxiliary Variable method,we have further developed an effective numerical scheme to solve the model.The scheme is highly efficient and only two linear and decoupled equations are needed to solve at every time step.We then prove that the numerical method is unconditionally energy stable,the stability and accuracy of the new scheme are demonstrated by numerous numerical examples conducted.By qualitatively comparing the equilibrium solution obtained by the new model and the classic Cahn-Hilliard model,we illustrate the effectiveness of the new model.