Adaptive Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Elements for Advective Allen-Cahn Equation

Abstract: We apply a space adaptive interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method for solving advective Allen-Cahn equation with expanding and contracting velocity fields. The advective Allen-Cahn equation is first discretized in time and the resulting semi-linear elliptic PDE is solved by an adaptive algorithm using a residual-based a posteriori error estimator. The a posteriori error estimator contains additional terms due to the non-divergence-free velocity field. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the adaptive approach by resolving the sharp layers accurately.