A robust solver for a second order mixed finite element method for the Cahn-Hilliard equation (Q2279866)

The authors propose a second-order-in-time mixed finite element scheme for the Cahn-Hilliard equation. The idea is to split the Cahn-Hilliard equation into two coupled second order PDEs and use mixed finite elements in spatial discretization, while the second order convex splitting approach is employed in temporal discretization to achieve the unconditional energy stability. A Newton iteration based solver was developed to solve the fully discrete nonlinear system at each time step. The key ingredient of the solver is a preconditioned minimal residual algorithm (with a multigrid preconditioner) whose performance is independent of the spatial mesh size and the time step size for a given interfacial width parameter. Numerical experiments were shown to confirm the performance of the proposed second order scheme, which showed its advantage over the first order version previously developed by the authors [J. Sci. Comput. 77, No. 2, 1234--1249 (2018; Zbl 1407.65179)].