Accelerating phase-field simulations of grain growth via tensor decomposition

Abstract

Phase-field models provide a powerful framework for simulating grain growth phenomena in polycrystalline materials, but their application to large-scale systems is limited by the high computational and memory costs associated with resolving multiple phase variables over fine spatial and temporal scales. This paper presents a tensor decomposition based model reduction framework for accelerating phase-field simulations of grain growth. The proposed method exploits the underlying low-rank structure of the evolving phase-field variables and represents the high-dimensional solution in a spatially decomposed tensor format. By performing the numerical computations directly within this reduced representation, the framework decreases storage requirements and reduces the cost of repeatedly solving the phase-field equations. The number of modes for the decomposed approximation is controlled during the online computation with a subspace mode-updating algorithm, to balance computational efficiency and approximation accuracy. The method is assessed using representative grain growth problems, and its predictions are compared with those obtained from conventional full-order finite element simulations. The results demonstrate that the formulation can accurately reproduce the evolution of grain morphology and the principal characteristics of grain growth kinetics while substantially improving computational efficiency. The proposed framework therefore provides a promising approach for extending phase-field simulations to larger spatial domains, finer discretizations, and systems containing a large number of phase variables.