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

An enhanced and highly efficient semi-implicit combined Lagrange multiplier approach with preserving original energy law for dissipative systems

Recently, a new Lagrange multiplier approach was introduced by Cheng, Liu and Shen in \cite{cheng2020new}, which has been broadly used to solve various challenging phase field problems. To design original energy stable schemes, they have to solve a nonlinear algebraic equation to determine the introduced Lagrange multiplier, which can be computationally expensive, especially for large-scale and long-time simulations involving complex nonlinear terms. This paper presents an essential improved technique to modify this issue, which can be seen as a semi-implicit combined Lagrange multiplier approach. In general, the new constructed schemes keep all the advantages of the Lagrange multiplier method and significantly reduce the computation costs. Besides, the new proposed BDF2 scheme dissipates the original energy, as opposed to a modified energy for the classical Lagrange multiplier approach in \cite{cheng2020new}. We further construct high-order BDF$k$ schemes based on the new proposed approach. In addition, we establish a general framework for extending our constructed method to dissipative systems. Finally several examples have been presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

A novel high-order linearly implicit and energy-stable additive Runge-Kutta methods for gradient flow models

This paper introduces a novel paradigm for constructing linearly implicit and high-order unconditionally energy-stable schemes for general gradient flows, utilizing the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) approach and the additive Runge-Kutta (ARK) methods. We provide a rigorous proof of energy stability, unique solvability, and convergence. The proposed schemes generalizes some recently developed high-order, energy-stable schemes and address their shortcomings. On the one other hand, the proposed schemes can incorporate existing SAV-RK type methods after judiciously selecting the Butcher tables of ARK methods \cite{sav_li,sav_nlsw}. The order of a SAV-RKPC method can thus be confirmed theoretically by the order conditions of the corresponding ARK method. Several new schemes are constructed based on our framework, which perform to be more stable than existing SAV-RK type methods. On the other hand, the proposed schemes do not limit to a specific form of the nonlinear part of the free energy and can achieve high order with fewer intermediate stages compared to the convex splitting ARK methods \cite{csrk}. Numerical experiments demonstrate stability and efficiency of proposed schemes