David Salac

Ebrahim M. Kolahdouz, David Salac

Here a semi-implicit formulation of the gradient augmented level set method is presented. By tracking both the level set and it's gradient accurate subgrid information is provided,leading to highly accurate descriptions of a moving interface. The result is a hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian method that may be easily applied in two or three dimensions. The new approach allows for the investigation of interfaces evolving by mean curvature and by the intrinsic Laplacian of the curvature. In this work the algorithm, convergence and accuracy results are presented. Several numerical experiments in both two and three dimensions demonstrate the stability of the scheme.

Prerna Gera, David Salac

The Cahn-Hilliard system has been used to describe a wide number of phase separation processes, from co-polymer systems to lipid membranes. In this work the convergence properties of a closest-point based scheme is investigated. In place of solving the original fourth-order system directly, two coupled second-order systems are solved. The system is solved using an incomplete Schur-decomposition as a preconditioner. The results indicate that with a sufficiently high-order time discretization the method only depends on the underlying spatial resolution.

David Salac

Including derivative information in the modelling of moving interfaces has been proposed as one method to increase the accuracy of numerical schemes with minimal additional cost. Here a new level set reinitialization technique using the fast marching method is presented. This augmented fast marching method will calculate the signed distance function and up to the second-order derivatives of the signed distance function for arbitrary interfaces. In addition to enforcing the condition $|\nablaϕ|^2=1$, where $ϕ$ is the level set function, the method ensures that $\nabla(|\nablaϕ|)^2=0$ and $\nabla\nabla(|\nablaϕ|)^2=0$ are also satisfied. Results indicate that for both two- and three-dimensional interfaces the resulting level set and curvature field are smooth even for coarse grids. Convergence results show that using first-order upwind derivatives and the augmented fast marching method result in a second-order accurate level set and gradient field and a first-order accurate curvature field.

Guhan Velmurugan, Ebrahim M. Kolahdouz, David Salac

Many interfacial phenomena in physical and biological systems are dominated by high order geometric quantities such as curvature. Here a semi-implicit method is combined with a level set jet scheme to handle stiff nonlinear advection problems. The new method offers an improvement over the semi-implicit gradient augmented level set method previously introduced by requiring only one smoothing step when updating the level set jet function while still preserving the underlying methods higher accuracy. Sample results demonstrate that accuracy is not sacrificed while strict time step restrictions can be avoided.