Numerical simulation of Swift–Hohenberg equation by the fourth-order compact scheme

A high-order accurate compact scheme for the Swift–Hohenberg equation is presented in this paper. We discretize the Swift–Hohenberg equation by a fourth-order compact finite difference formula in space and a backward differentiation with second-order accurate in time, respectively. A stabilized splitting scheme is presented and a Newton-type iterative method is introduced to deal with the nonlinear term. Therefore, a large time step can be used. The resulting discrete systems are solved by a fast and efficient nonlinear multigrid solver. Adaptive time step method is implemented to reduce the computational cost. Various numerical simulations including a convergence test of the proposed scheme, comparison with second-order scheme, a test of the stability of the proposed scheme, extension of the adaptive time step method, comparison with the phase field crystal equation, a study of the effect of computational domain and boundary condition, and an evolution of Swift–Hohenberg equation in three dimensions, are performed to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method.