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A Flux-Corrected Phase-Field Method for Surface Diffusion

Part of: Time-dependent statistical mechanics (dynamic and nonequilibrium)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2017

Yujie Zhang  and
Wenjing Ye
Yujie Zhang*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
Wenjing Ye*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Division of Biomedical Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
*
*Corresponding author. Email addresses:mewye@ust.hk (W. Ye), yzhangbx@connect.ust.hk (Y. Zhang)
*Corresponding author. Email addresses:mewye@ust.hk (W. Ye), yzhangbx@connect.ust.hk (Y. Zhang)
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Abstract

Phase-field methods with a degenerate mobility have been widely used to simulate surface diffusion motion. However, apart from the motion induced by surface diffusion, adverse effects such as shrinkage, coarsening and false merging have been observed in the results obtained from the current phase-field methods, which largely affect the accuracy and numerical stability of these methods. In this paper, a flux-corrected phase-field method is proposed to improve the performance of phase-field methods for simulating surface diffusion. The three effects were numerically studied for the proposed method and compared with those observed in the two existing methods, the original phase-field method and the profile-corrected phase-field method. Results show that compared to the original phase-field method, the shrinkage effect in the profile-corrected phase-field method has been significantly reduced. However, coarsening and false merging effects still present and can be significant in some cases. The flux-corrected phase field performs the best in terms of eliminating the shrinkage and coarsening effects. The false merging effect still exists when the diffuse regions of different interfaces overlap with each other. But it has been much reduced as compared to that in the other two methods.

Keywords

Phase-field methodsurface diffusionbulk diffusionprofile correctionflux correction

MSC classification

Secondary: 82C24: Interface problems; diffusion-limited aggregation

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Communications in Computational Physics , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , August 2017 , pp. 422 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © Global-Science Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Communicated by Kun Xu

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