Simon Praetorius

Simon Praetorius, Axel Voigt

We develop a preconditioner for the linear system arising from a finite element discretization of the Phase Field Crystal (PFC) equation. The PFC model serves as an atomic description of crystalline materials on diffusive time scales and thus offers the opportunity to study long time behaviour of materials with atomic details. This requires adaptive time stepping and efficient time discretization schemes, for which we use an embedded Rosenbrock scheme. To resolve spatial scales of practical relevance, parallel algorithms are also required, which scale to large numbers of processors. The developed preconditioner provides such a tool. It is based on an approximate factorization of the system matrix and can be implemented efficiently. The preconditioner is analyzed in detail and shown to speed up the computation drastically.

Simon Praetorius, Marco Salvalaglio, Axel Voigt

The study of polycrystalline materials requires theoretical and computational techniques enabling multiscale investigations. The amplitude expansion of the phase field crystal model (APFC) allows for describing crystal lattice properties on diffusive timescales by focusing on continuous fields varying on length scales larger than the atomic spacing. Thus, it allows for the simulation of large systems still retaining details of the crystal lattice. Fostered by the applications of this approach, we present here an efficient numerical framework to solve its equations. In particular, we consider a real space approach exploiting the finite element method. An optimized preconditioner is developed in order to improve the convergence of the linear solver. Moreover, a mesh adaptivity criterion based on the local rotation of the polycrystal is used. This results in an unprecedented capability of simulating large, three-dimensional systems including the dynamical description of the microstructures in polycrystalline materials together with their dislocation networks.

Michael Nestler, Ingo Nitschke, Simon Praetorius et al.

We consider the numerical investigation of surface bound orientational order using unit tangential vector fields by means of a gradient-flow equation of a weak surface Frank-Oseen energy. The energy is composed of intrinsic and extrinsic contributions, as well as a penalization term to enforce the unity of the vector field. Four different numerical discretizations, namely a discrete exterior calculus approach, a method based on vector spherical harmonics, a surface finite-element method, and an approach utilizing an implicit surface description, the diffuse interface method, are described and compared with each other for surfaces with Euler characteristic 2. We demonstrate the influence of geometric properties on realizations of the Poincare-Hopf theorem and show examples where the energy is decreased by introducing additional orientational defects.