An Onsager Variational Scheme for Pressure-Driven Tumor Growth and Hele-Shaw Limits

Abstract

Pressure-driven tumor growth models describe the coupling between cell proliferation and mechanical pressure and naturally lead to moving free boundary problems. Their numerical approximation is challenging due to degenerate diffusion, pressure-dependent proliferation, and the stiffness of the pressure law \(p=n^γ\) for large \(γ\). In this paper, we propose a structure-preserving finite difference method for this class of pressure-driven tumor growth models with pressure-dependent proliferation. The method is derived from the Onsager variational principle. The key idea is to introduce a modified energy shifted by the homeostatic pressure, so that the growth term can be written in a dissipative form and incorporated together with the transport part into a unified Rayleighian formulation. This formulation leads to a time-discrete constrained minimization problem and a fully discrete scheme with explicit mobilities and an implicit pressure update. We prove that the scheme preserves nonnegativity and the homeostatic upper bound, satisfies a discrete modified energy dissipation law, and admits a fixed-grid stiff-pressure limiting structure. Numerical experiments in one and two spatial dimensions demonstrate the accuracy of the method, its convergence toward the Hele--Shaw limit for large \(γ\), and its ability to capture free boundary evolutions with topology changes.