Application of mortar elements to diffuse-interface methods

An adaptive 2D mesh refinement technique based on mortarspectral elements applied to diffuse-interface methods is presented. The refinement algorithm tracksthe movement of the 2D diffuse-interface and subsequently refines the mesh locally at that interface, whilecoarsening the mesh in the rest of the computational domain, based on error estimators. Convergence of the methodis validated using a Gaussian distribution problem and results are presented for a Cahn-Hilliard diffuseinterface model applied to capture the transient dynamics of polymer blends.