Homogenization in coarsening systems -: I:: Deterministic case

We study the homogenization limit of the Mullins-Sekerka problem which serves as a model for late-stage coarsening in a phase transformation. We consider the case that the screening length which describes the effective range of particle interactions is much smaller than the system size, which leads to homogenization problems in unbounded domains. The present paper deals with deterministic initial particle distributions which are in an average sense homogeneously distributed. Stochastic particle distributions will be considered in a second paper (Part II).