A parametric finite element method for solid-state dewetting problems in three dimensions

Abstract

We propose a parametric finite element method (PFEM) for efficiently solving the morphological evolution of solid-state dewetting of thin films on a flat rigid substrate in three dimensions (3D). The interface evolution of the dewetting problem in 3D is described by a sharp-interface model, which includes surface diffusion coupled with contact line migration. A variational formulation of the sharp-interface model is presented, and a PFEM is proposed for spatial discretization. For temporal discretization, at each time step, we first update the position of the contact line according to the relaxed contact angle condition; then, by using the position of the new contact line as the boundary condition, we solve a linear algebra system resulted from the discretization of PFEM to obtain the new interface surface for the next step. The well-posedness of the solution of the PFEM is also established. Extensive numerical results are reported to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed PFEM and to show the complexities of the dewetting morphology evolution observed in solid-state dewetting experiments.

arXiv comment25 pages, 20 figures

References in corpus (4)

• A variational approach to the moving contact line hydrodynamics
• A parametric finite element method for solid-state dewetting problems with anisotropic surface energies
• Sharp interface model for solid-state dewetting problems with weakly anisotropic surface energies
• Sharp-interface approach for simulating solid-state dewetting in two dimensions: a Cahn-Hoffman $\mathbf{\xi }$-vector formulation

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• An energy-stable parametric finite element method for anisotropic surface diffusion
• A structure-preserving finite element approximation of surface diffusion for curve networks and surface clusters