C0 Interior Penalty Methods for Cahn-Hilliard Equations

Abstract

In this work we study C0 interior penalty methods for Cahn-Hilliard equations. In Chapter 1 we introduce Cahn-Hilliard equations and the time discretization that leads to linear fourth order boundary value problems. In Chapter 2 we review related fundamentals of finite element methods and multigrid methods. In Chapter 3 we formulate the discrete problems for linear fourth order boundary value problems with the boundary conditions of the Cahn-Hilliard type, which are called C0 interior penalty methods, and we carry out the convergence analysis. In Chapter 4 we consider multigrid methods for the C0 interior penalty methods. We present two smoothing schemes and compare their performance. In Chapter 5 we apply the C0 interior penalty methods and the time discretization scheme to nonlinear time-dependent Cahn-Hilliard equations. Numerical examples for phase separation and image processing are presented