Convergence of finite elements on an evolving surface driven by diffusion on the surface
Provides a novel convergence analysis for evolving surface finite elements applied to coupled surface diffusion and evolution problems, addressing a known bottleneck in numerical analysis.
The paper proves convergence of spatial semidiscretization for parabolic surface PDEs coupled to surface evolution, where velocity depends on the solution. Stability analysis uses matrix-vector formulation without geometric arguments, with geometry only in consistency estimates.
For a parabolic surface partial differential equation coupled to surface evolution, convergence of the spatial semidiscretization is studied in this paper. The velocity of the evolving surface is not given explicitly, but depends on the solution of the parabolic equation on the surface. Various velocity laws are considered: elliptic regularization of a direct pointwise coupling, a regularized mean curvature flow and a dynamic velocity law. A novel stability and convergence analysis for evolving surface finite elements for the coupled problem of surface diffusion and surface evolution is developed. The stability analysis works with the matrix-vector formulation of the method and does not use geometric arguments. The geometry enters only into the consistency estimates. Numerical experiments complement the theoretical results.