The celebrated Cahn–Hilliard (CH) equation was proposed to model the process of phase separation in binary alloys by Cahn and Hilliard. Since then the equation has been extended to a variety of chemical, physical, biological, and other engineering fields such as spinodal decomposition, diblock copolymer, image inpainting, multiphase fluid flows, microstructures with elastic inhomogeneity, tumor growth simulation, and topology optimization. Therefore, it is important to understand the basic mechanism of the CH equation in each modeling type. In this paper, we review the applications of the CH equation and describe the basic mechanism of each modeling type with helpful references and computational simulation results.

In this paper, we review the Fourier-spectral method for some phase-field models: Allen–Cahn (AC), Cahn–Hilliard (CH), Swift–Hohenberg (SH), phase-field crystal (PFC), and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth. These equations are very important parabolic partial differential equations and are applicable to many interesting scientific problems. The AC equation is a reaction-diffusion equation modeling anti-phase domain coarsening dynamics. The CH equation models phase segregation of binary mixtures. The SH equation is a popular model for generating patterns in spatially extended dissipative systems. A classical PFC model is originally derived to investigate the dynamics of atomic-scale crystal growth. An isotropic symmetry MBE growth model is originally devised as a method for directly growing high purity epitaxial thin film of molecular beams evaporating on a heated substrate. The Fourier-spectral method is highly accurate and simple to implement. We present a detailed description of the method and explain its connection to MATLAB usage so that the interested readers can use the Fourier-spectral method for their research needs without difficulties. Several standard computational tests are done to demonstrate the performance of the method. Furthermore, we provide the MATLAB codes implementation in the Appendix A.