Elliptic operators with discontinuous coefficients in meshfree GFDM

In phase change simulations, material properties such as density, viscosity, or thermal conductivity may exhibit jump discontinuities, possibly of several orders of magnitude. These jump discontinuities represent interfaces between the phases, and they emerge naturally during the simulation; thus, their exact location is generally unknown a priori. Our goal is to simulate phase change processes with a meshfree generalized finite difference method in a monolithic model without distinguishing between the different phases. There, the material properties mentioned above appear as coefficients inside elliptic operators in divergence form and the jumps must be treated adequately by the numerical method. We present a numerical method for discretizing elliptic operators with discontinuous coefficients without the need for a domain decomposition or tracking of interfaces. Our method facilitates the construction of diagonally dominant diffusion operators that lead to M‐matrices for the discrete Poisson's equation, and thus, satisfy the discrete maximum principle. We demonstrate the applicability of the new method for the case of smooth diffusivity and discontinuous diffusivity. We show that the method is first‐order accurate for discontinuous diffusion problems and provides second‐order and fourth‐order convergence for continuous diffusion coefficients.