Fast solution of a phase-field model of pitting corrosion

Excessive computational times represent a major challenge in the solution of corrosion models, limiting their practical applicability, e.g., as a support to predictive maintenance. In this paper, we propose an efficient strategy for solving a phase-field model for metal corrosion. Based on the Kronecker structure of the diffusion matrix in classical finite difference approximations on rectangular domains, time-stepping IMEX methods are efficiently solved in matrix form. However, when the domain is non-rectangular, the lack of the Kronecker structure prevents the direct use of the matrix-based approach. To address this issue, we reformulate the problem on an extended rectangular domain and introduce suitable iterative IMEX methods. The convergence of the iterations and the propagation of the numerical errors are analyzed. Test cases on two and three dimensional domains show that the proposed approach achieves accuracy comparable to existing methods, while significantly reducing the computational time, to the point of allowing actual predictions on standard workstations.