Error control for the approximation of Allen-Cahn and Cahn-Hilliard equations with a logarithmic potential (Q647361)

The authors study finite element error estimates for the Allen-Cahn and the Cahn-Hilliard equations with a logarithmic potential. By using a generalized Gronwall lemma, they establish an abstract error analysis for the Allen-Cahn equation and the Cahn-Hilliard equation in Section 3 and Section 4, respectively. In Section 5, they present computable and quasi-optimal error estimates in \(L^{\infty}(0, T; L^2 (\Omega))\) for the Allen-Cahn problem and in \(L^{\infty} (0, T; H^1 (\Omega)')\) for the Cahn-Hilliard problem by applying the results in Section 3 and 4. The results are proposed upon non-standard finite element methods. In section 6, they use the lowest order continuous finite elements to verify the logarithmic bounds for the time integrated principal eigenvalue \(\Lambda_{CH}\) past topological changes, and to analyze the dependence of the solution on the temperature. The extensive computations are carried out both on uniform and adaptive triangulations of the domain \(\Omega\). The main contributions of the paper are: (1) the derivation of conditional error estimates for Cahn-Hilliard equations that are robust past topological changes, (2) the treatment of logarithmic potentials for Allen-Cahn and Cahn-Hilliard equations, (3) the derivation of quasi-optimal a posteriori error estimates in weaker norms for non-standard finite element methods, (4) the numerical verification of the conditional a posteriori error estimates, and (5) numerical experiments that indicate partial robustness also with respect to critical transition temperature.