Unconditional positivity-preserving and energy stable schemes for a reduced Poisson-Nernst-Planck system

Abstract

The Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) system is a widely accepted model for simulation of ionic channels. In this paper, we design, analyze, and numerically validate a second order unconditional positivity-preserving scheme for solving a reduced PNP system, which can well approximate the three dimensional ion channel problem. Positivity of numerical solutions is proven to hold true independent of the size of time steps and the choice of the Poisson solver. The scheme is easy to implement without resorting to any iteration method. Several numerical examples further confirm the positivity-preserving property, and demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed scheme, as well as the fast approach to steady states.

arXiv comment22 pages, 5 tables, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Communications in Computational Physics, 2019

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• A free energy satisfying finite difference method for Poisson--Nernst--Planck equations
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Efficient, positive, and energy stable schemes for multi-D Poisson-Nernst-Planck systems
• A unified structure preserving scheme for a multi-species model with a gradient flow structure and nonlocal interactions via singular kernels