Jia Zhao

Xiaofeng Yang, Jia Zhao, Qi Wang et al.

How to develop efficient numerical schemes while preserving the energy stability at the discrete level is a challenging issue for the three component Cahn-Hilliard phase-field model. In this paper, we develop first and second order temporal approximation schemes based on the "Invariant Energy Quadratization" approach, where all nonlinear terms are treated semi-explicitly. Consequently, the resulting numerical schemes lead to a well-posed linear system with the symmetric positive definite operator to be solved at each time step. We rigorously prove that the proposed schemes are unconditionally energy stable. Various 2D and 3D numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the stability and the accuracy of the schemes.

Xiaofeng Yang, Jia Zhao

In this paper, we consider numerical approximations for the viscous Cahn-Hilliard equation with hyperbolic relaxation. This type of equations processes energy-dissipative structure. The main challenge in solving such a diffusive system numerically is how to develop high order temporal discretization for the hyperbolic and nonlinear terms, allowing large time-marching step, while preserving the energy stability, i.e. the energy dissipative structure at the time-discrete level. We resolve this issue by developing two second-order time-marching schemes using the recently developed "Invariant Energy Quadratization" approach where all nonlinear terms are discretized semi-explicitly. In each time step, one only needs to solve a symmetric positive definite (SPD) linear system. All the proposed schemes are rigorously proven to be unconditionally energy stable, and the second-order convergence in time has been verified by time step refinement tests numerically. Various 2D and 3D numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the stability, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed schemes.

Xiaofeng Yang, Jia Zhao

In this paper, we consider the numerical approximations for the fourth order Cahn-Hilliard equation with concentration dependent mobility, and the logarithmic Flory-Huggins potential. One challenge in solving such a diffusive system numerically is how to develop proper temporal discretization for nonlinear terms in order to preserve the energy stability at the time-discrete level. We resolve this issue by developing a set of the first and second order time marching schemes based on a novel, called "Invariant Energy Quadratization" approach. Its novelty is that the proposed scheme is linear and symmetric positive definite because all nonlinear terms are treated semi-explicitly. We further prove all proposed schemes are unconditionally energy stable rigorously. Various 2D and 3D numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the stability, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed schemes thereafter.

Lizhen Chen, Jia Zhao, Hong Wang

In this paper, we study the phase field models with fractional-order in time. The phase field models have been widely used to study coarsening dynamics of material systems with microstructures. It is known that phase field models are usually derived from energy variation so that they obey some energy dissipation laws intrinsically. Recently, many works have been published on investigating fractional-order phase field models, but little is known of the corresponding energy dissipation laws. We focus on the time-fractional phase field models and report that the effective free energy and roughness obey a universal power-law scaling dynamics during coarsening. Mainly, the effective free energy and roughness in the time-fractional phase field models scale by following a similar power law as the integer phase field models, where the power is linearly proportional to the fractional order. This universal scaling law is verified numerically against several phase field models, including the Cahn-Hilliard equations with different variable mobilities and molecular beam epitaxy models. This new finding sheds light on potential applications of time fractional phase field models in studying coarsening dynamics and crystal growths.

Lizhen Chen, Jia Zhao, Waixiang Cao et al.

In this paper, we propose a time-fractional molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) model with slope selection and its efficient, accurate, full discrete, linear numerical approximation. The numerical scheme utilizes the fast algorithm for the Caputo fractional derivative operator in time discretization and Fourier spectral method in spatial discretization. Refinement tests are conducted to verify the $2-α$ order of time convergence, with $α\in (0, 1]$ the fractional order of derivative. Several numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our newly proposed scheme. By exploring the fast algorithm calculating the Caputo fractional derivative, our numerical scheme makes it practice for long time simulation of MBE coarsening, which is essential for MBE model in practice. With the proposed fractional MBE model, we observe that the scaling law for the energy decays as $ O(t^{-\fracα{3}})$ and the roughness increases as $O(t^{\fracα{3}})$, during the coarsening dynamics with random initial condition. That is to say, the coarsening rate of MBE model could be manipulated by the fractional order $α$, and it is linearly proportional to $α$. This is the first time in literature to report/discover such scaling correlation. It provides a potential application field for fractional differential equations. Besides, the numerical approximation strategy proposed in this paper can be readily applied to study many classes of time-fractional and high dimensional phase field models.

Jia Zhao, Jarrod Mau

Model discovery based on existing data has been one of the major focuses of mathematical modelers for decades. Despite tremendous achievements of model identification from adequate data, how to unravel the models from limited data is less resolved. In this paper, we focus on the model discovery problem when the data is not efficiently sampled in time. This is common due to limited experimental accessibility and labor/resource constraints. Specifically, we introduce a recursive deep neural network (RDNN) for data-driven model discovery. This recursive approach can retrieve the governing equation in a simple and efficient manner, and it can significantly improve the approximation accuracy by increasing the recursive stages. In particular, our proposed approach shows superior power when the existing data are sampled with a large time lag, from which the traditional approach might not be able to recover the model well. Several widely used examples of dynamical systems are used to benchmark this newly proposed recursive approach. Numerical comparisons confirm the effectiveness of this recursive neural network for model discovery.

Colby L. Wight, Jia Zhao

Phase field models, in particular, the Allen-Cahn type and Cahn-Hilliard type equations, have been widely used to investigate interfacial dynamic problems. Designing accurate, efficient, and stable numerical algorithms for solving the phase field models has been an active field for decades. In this paper, we focus on using the deep neural network to design an automatic numerical solver for the Allen-Cahn and Cahn-Hilliard equations by proposing an improved physics informed neural network (PINN). Though the PINN has been embraced to investigate many differential equation problems, we find a direct application of the PINN in solving phase-field equations won't provide accurate solutions in many cases. Thus, we propose various techniques that add to the approximation power of the PINN. As a major contribution of this paper, we propose to embrace the adaptive idea in both space and time and introduce various sampling strategies, such that we are able to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the PINN on solving phase field equations. In addition, the improved PINN has no restriction on the explicit form of the PDEs, making it applicable to a wider class of PDE problems, and shedding light on numerical approximations of other PDEs in general.