Surface PDEs Research Articles

An adaptive octree finite element method for PDEs posed on surfaces

Abstract The paper develops a finite element method for partial differential equations posed on hypersurfaces in R N , N = 2 , 3 . The method uses traces of bulk finite element functions on a surface embedded in a volumetric domain. The bulk finite element space is defined on an octree grid which is locally refined or coarsened depending on error indicators and estimated values of the surface curvatures. The cartesian structure of the bulk mesh leads to easy and efficient adaptation process, while the trace finite element method makes fitting the mesh to the surface unnecessary. The number of degrees of freedom involved in computations is consistent with the two-dimension nature of surface PDEs. No parametrization of the surface is required; it can be given implicitly by a level set function. In practice, a variant of the marching cubes method is used to recover the surface with the second order accuracy. We prove the optimal order of accuracy for the trace finite element method in H 1 and L 2 surface norms for a problem with smooth solution and quasi-uniform mesh refinement. Experiments with less regular problems demonstrate optimal convergence with respect to the number of degrees of freedom, if grid adaptation is based on an appropriate error indicator. The paper shows results of numerical experiments for a variety of geometries and problems, including advection–diffusion equations on surfaces. Analysis and numerical results of the paper suggest that combination of cartesian adaptive meshes and the unfitted (trace) finite elements provide simple, efficient, and reliable tool for numerical treatment of PDEs posed on surfaces.

Finite element methods for surface PDEs

In this article we consider finite element methods for approximating the solution of partial differential equations on surfaces. We focus on surface finite elements on triangulated surfaces, implicit surface methods using level set descriptions of the surface, unfitted finite element methods and diffuse interface methods. In order to formulate the methods we present the necessary geometric analysis and, in the context of evolving surfaces, the necessary transport formulae. A wide variety of equations and applications are covered. Some ideas of the numerical analysis are presented along with illustrative numerical examples.

A finite element method for surface PDEs: matrix properties

We consider a recently introduced new finite element approach for the discretization of elliptic partial differential equations on surfaces. The main idea of this method is to use finite element spaces that are induced by triangulations of an “outer” domain to discretize the partial differential equation on the surface. The method is particularly suitable for problems in which there is a coupling with a problem in an outer domain that contains the surface, for example, two-phase flow problems. It has been proved that the method has optimal order of convergence both in the H 1 and in the L 2-norm. In this paper, we address linear algebra aspects of this new finite element method. In particular the conditioning of the mass and stiffness matrix is investigated. For the two-dimensional case we present an analysis which proves that the (effective) spectral condition number of the diagonally scaled mass matrix and the diagonally scaled stiffness matrix behaves like h −3| ln h| and h −2| ln h|, respectively, where h is the mesh size of the outer triangulation.