An energy stable and positivity-preserving scheme for the Maxwell-Stefan diffusion system

Abstract: We develop a new finite difference scheme for the Maxwell-Stefan diffusion system. The scheme is conservative, energy stable and positivity-preserving. These nice properties stem from a variational structure and are proved by reformulating the finite difference scheme into an equivalent optimization problem. The solution to the scheme emerges as the minimizer of the optimization problem, and as a consequence energy stability and positivity-preserving properties are obtained.