A method is presented to solve two-phase problems involving a material quantity on an interface. The interface can be advected, stretched, and change topology, and material can be adsorbed to or desorbed from it. The method is based on the use of a diffuse interface framework, which allows a simple implementation using standard finite-difference or finite-element techniques. Here, finite-difference methods on a block-structured adaptive grid are used, and the resulting equations are solved using a non-linear multigrid method. Interfacial flow with soluble surfactants is used as an example of the application of the method, and several test cases are presented demonstrating its accuracy and convergence.

We extend previous work and present a general approach for solving partial differential equations in complex, stationary, or moving geometries with Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin boundary conditions. Using an implicit representation of the geometry through an auxilliary phase field function, which replaces the sharp boundary of the domain with a diffuse layer (e.g. diffuse domain), the equation is reformulated on a larger regular domain. The resulting partial differential equation is of the same order as the original equation, with additional lower order terms to approximate the boundary conditions. The reformulated equation can be solved by standard numerical techniques. We use the method of matched asymptotic expansions to show that solutions of the re-formulated equations converge to those of the original equations. We provide numerical simulations which confirm this analysis. We also present applications of the method to growing domains and complex three-dimensional structures and we discuss applications to cell biology and heteroepitaxy.

In this paper, a numerical scheme for a generalized planar Ginzburg-Landau energy in a circular geometry is studied. A spectral-Galerkin method is utilized, and a stability analysis and an error estimate for the scheme are presented. It is shown that the scheme is unconditionally stable. We present numerical simulation results that have been obtained by using the scheme with various sets of boundary data, including those the form () = exp(), where the integer denotes the topological degree of the solution. These numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental and analytical results. Results include the computation of bifurcations from pure bend or splay patterns to spiral patterns for = 1, and computations of metastable or unstable higher-energy solutions as well as the lowest energy ground state solutions for values of ranging from two to five.

We construct a mean-field variational model to study how the dependence of dielectric coefficient (i.e., relative permittivity) on local ionic concentrations affects the electrostatic interaction in an ionic solution near a charged surface. The electrostatic free-energy functional of ionic concentrations, which is the key object in our model, consists mainly of the electrostatic potential energy and the ionic ideal-gas entropy. The electrostatic potential is determined by Poisson's equation in which the dielectric coefficient depends on the sum of concentrations of individual ionic species. This dependence is assumed to be qualitatively the same as that on the salt concentration for which experimental data are available and analytical forms can be obtained by the data fitting. We derive the first and second variations of the free-energy functional, obtain the generalized Boltzmann distributions, and show that the free-energy functional is in general nonconvex. To validate our mathematical analysis, we numerically minimize our electrostatic free-energy functional for a radially symmetric charged system. Our extensive computations reveal several features that are significantly different from a system modeled with a dielectric coefficient independent of ionic concentration. These include the non-monotonicity of ionic concentrations, the ionic depletion near a charged surface that has been previously predicted by a one-dimensional model, and the enhancement of such depletion due to the increase of surface charges or bulk ionic concentrations.

A mathematical model for tissue growth is considered. This model describes the dynamics of the density of cells due to pressure forces and proliferation. It is known that such cell population model converges at the incompressible limit towards a Hele-Shaw type free boundary problem. The novelty of this work is to impose a non-overlapping constraint. This constraint is important to be satisfied in many applications. One way to guarantee this non-overlapping constraint is to choose a singular pressure law. The aim of this paper is to prove that, although the pressure law has a singularity, the incompressible limit leads to the same Hele-Shaw free boundary problem.