No Arabic abstract
We introduce a class of high order accurate, semi-implicit Runge-Kutta schemes in the general setting of evolution equations that arise as gradient flow for a cost function, possibly with respect to an inner product that depends on the solution, and we establish their energy stability. This class includes as a special case high order, unconditionally stable schemes obtained via convexity splitting. The new schemes are demonstrated on a variety of gradient flows, including partial differential equations that are gradient flow with respect to the Wasserstein (mass transport) distance.
We present unconditionally energy stable Runge-Kutta (RK) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes for solving a class of fourth order gradient flows. Our algorithm is geared toward arbitrarily high order approximations in both space and time, while energy dissipation remains preserved without imposing any restriction on time steps and meshes. We achieve this in two steps. First, taking advantage of the penalty free DG method introduced by Liu and Yin [J Sci. Comput. 77:467--501, 2018] for spatial discretization, we reformulate an extended linearized ODE system by the energy quadratization (EQ) approach. Second, we apply an s-stage algebraically stable RK method for temporal discretization. The resulting fully discrete DG schemes are linear and unconditionally energy stable. In addition, we introduce a prediction-correction procedure to improve both the accuracy and stability of the scheme. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes by numerical tests with benchmark problems.
We present a systematical approach to developing arbitrarily high order, unconditionally energy stable numerical schemes for thermodynamically consistent gradient flow models that satisfy energy dissipation laws. Utilizing the energy quadratization (EQ) method, We formulate the gradient flow model into an equivalent form with a corresponding quadratic free energy functional. Based on the equivalent form with a quadratic energy, we propose two classes of energy stable numerical approximations. In the first approach, we use a prediction-correction strategy to improve the accuracy of linear numerical schemes. In the second approach, we adopt the Gaussian collocation method to discretize the equivalent form with a quadratic energy, arriving at an arbitrarily high-order scheme for gradient flow models. Schemes derived using both approaches are proved rigorously to be unconditionally energy stable. The proposed schemes are then implemented in four gradient flow models numerically to demonstrate their accuracy and effectiveness. Detailed numerical comparisons among these schemes are carried out as well. These numerical strategies are rather general so that they can be readily generalized to solve any thermodynamically consistent PDE models.
In this paper, we propose a novel family of high-order numerical schemes for the gradient flow models based on the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) approach, which is named the high-order scalar auxiliary variable (HSAV) method. The newly proposed schemes could be shown to reach arbitrarily high order in time while preserving the energy dissipation law without any restriction on the time step size (i.e., unconditionally energy stable). The HSAV strategy is rather general that it does not depend on the specific expression of the effective free energy, such that it applies to a class of thermodynamically consistent gradient flow models arriving at semi-discrete high-order energy-stable schemes. We then employ the Fourier pseudospectral method for spatial discretization. The fully discrete schemes are also shown to be unconditionally energy stable. Furthermore, we present several numerical experiments on several widely-used gradient flow models, to demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency and unconditionally energy stability of the HSAV schemes. The numerical results verify that the HSAV schemes can reach the expected order of accuracy, and it allows a much larger time step size to reach the same accuracy than the standard SAV schemes.
We present a methodology to construct efficient high-order in time accurate numerical schemes for a class of gradient flows with appropriate Lipschitz continuous nonlinearity. There are several ingredients to the strategy: the exponential time differencing (ETD), the multi-step (MS) methods, the idea of stabilization, and the technique of interpolation. They are synthesized to develop a generic $k^{th}$ order in time efficient linear numerical scheme with the help of an artificial regularization term of the form $Atau^kfrac{partial}{partial t}mathcal{L}^{p(k)}u$ where $mathcal{L}$ is the positive definite linear part of the flow, $tau$ is the uniform time step-size. The exponent $p(k)$ is determined explicitly by the strength of the Lipschitz nonlinear term in relation to $mathcal{L}$ together with the desired temporal order of accuracy $k$. To validate our theoretical analysis, the thin film epitaxial growth without slope selection model is examined with a fourth-order ETD-MS discretization in time and Fourier pseudo-spectral in space discretization. Our numerical results on convergence and energy stability are in accordance with our theoretical results.
This paper reviews different numerical methods for specific examples of Wasserstein gradient flows: we focus on nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations,but also discuss discretizations of the parabolic-elliptic Keller-Segel model and of the fourth order thin film equation. The methods under review are of Lagrangian nature, that is, the numerical approximations trace the characteristics of the underlying transport equation rather than solving the evolution equation for the mass density directly. The two main approaches are based on integrating the equation for the Lagrangian maps on the one hand, and on solution of coupled ODEs for individual mass particles on the other hand.