Unconditionally energy stable discontinuous Galerkin schemes for the Cahn-Hilliard equation

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce novel discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes for the Cahn-Hilliard equation, which arises in many applications. The method is designed by integrating the mixed DG method for the spatial discretization with the \emph{Invariant Energy Quadratization} (IEQ) approach for the time discretization. Coupled with a spatial projection, the resulting IEQ-DG schemes are shown to be unconditionally energy dissipative, and can be efficiently solved without resorting to any iteration method. Both one and two dimensional numerical examples are provided to verify the theoretical results, and demonstrate the good performance of IEQ-DG in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and preservation of the desired solution properties.