Adaptive rational spectral methods for the linear stability analysis of nonlinear fourth-order problems

This paper presents the application of adaptive rational spectral methods to the linear stability analysis of nonlinear fourth-order problems. Our model equation is a phase-field model of infiltration, but the proposed discretization can be directly extended to similar equations arising in thin film flows. The sharpness and structure of the wetting front preclude the use of the standard Chebyshev pseudo-spectral method, due to its slow convergence in problems where the solution has steep internal layers. We discuss the effectiveness and conditioning of the proposed discretization, and show that it allows the computation of accurate traveling waves and eigenvalues for small values of the initial water saturation/film precursor, several orders of magnitude smaller than the values considered previously in analogous stability analyses of thin film flows, using just a few hundred grid points.