High-order energy stable discrete variational derivative schemes for gradient flows

Abstract The existing discrete variational derivative method is fully implicit and only second-order accurate for gradient flow. In this paper, we propose a framework to construct high-order implicit (original) energy stable schemes and second-order semi-implicit (modified) energy stable schemes. Combined with the Runge–Kutta process, we can build high-order and unconditionally (original) energy stable schemes based on the discrete variational derivative method. The new energy stable schemes are implicit and leads to a large sparse nonlinear algebraic system at each time step, which can be efficiently solved by using an inexact Newton-type solver. To avoid solving nonlinear algebraic systems, we then present a relaxed discrete variational derivative method, which can construct second-order, linear and unconditionally (modified) energy stable schemes. Several numerical simulations are performed to investigate the efficiency, stability and accuracy of the newly proposed schemes.