High-efficiency and positivity-preserving stabilized SAV methods for gradient flows

The scalar auxiliary variable (SAV)-type methods are very popular techniques for solving various nonlinear dissipative systems. Compared to the semi-implicit method, the baseline SAV method can keep a modified energy dissipation law but doubles the computational cost. The general SAV approach does not add additional computation but needs to solve a semi-implicit solution in advance, which may potentially compromise the accuracy and stability. In this paper, we construct a novel first- and second-order unconditional energy stable and positivity-preserving stabilized SAV (PS-SAV) schemes for $L^2$ and $H^{-1}$ gradient flows. The constructed schemes can reduce nearly half computational cost of the baseline SAV method and preserve its accuracy and stability simultaneously. Meanwhile, the introduced auxiliary variable is always positive while the baseline SAV cannot guarantee this positivity-preserving property. Unconditionally energy dissipation laws are derived for the proposed numerical schemes. We also establish a rigorous error analysis of the first-order scheme for the Allen-Cahn type equation in $l^{\infty}(0,T; H^1(\Omega) )$ norm. In addition we propose an energy optimization technique to optimize the modified energy close to the original energy. Several interesting numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed methods

A scalar auxiliary variable unfitted FEM for the surface Cahn-Hilliard equation

The paper studies a scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) method to solve the Cahn-Hilliard equation with degenerate mobility posed on a smooth closed surface {\Gamma}. The SAV formulation is combined with adaptive time stepping and a geometrically unfitted trace finite element method (TraceFEM), which embeds {\Gamma} in R3. The stability is proven to hold in an appropriate sense for both first- and second-order in time variants of the method. The performance of our SAV method is illustrated through a series of numerical experiments, which include systematic comparison with a stabilized semi-explicit method.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure

REMARKS ON THE ASYMPTOTIC BEHAVIOR OF SCALAR AUXILIARY VARIABLE (SAV) SCHEMES

We introduce a time semi-discretization of a damped wave equation by a SAV scheme with second order accuracy. The energy dissipation law is shown to hold without any restriction on the time step. We prove that any sequence generated by the scheme converges to a steady state (up to a subsequence). We notice that the steady state equation associated to the SAV scheme is a modified version of the steady state equation associated to the damped wave equation. We show that a similar result holds for a SAV fully discrete version of the Cahn-Hilliard equation and we compare numerically the two steady state equations