Special Session 151: Encounter and Merging of Mesh-based Methods and Meshless Methods in the Era of Machine Learning

Structure-preserving parametric finite element method for surface diffusion
Chunmei Su
Tsinghua University
Peoples Rep of China
Co-Author(s):    
Abstract:
We propose a novel formulation for parametric finite element methods to simulate surface diffusion, which incorporates two scalar Lagrange multipliers and two evolution equations involving the surface area and volume, respectively, to ensure that the resulting numerical methods preserve the geometric structure of surface diffusion, i.e., the area-decreasing and volume-preserving properties. By discretizing the spatial variable using linear finite elements and the temporal variable using either the Crank-Nicolson method or the backward differentiation formulae method, we develop several high-order temporal schemes that effectively preserve the structure at a fully discrete level. These new schemes are implicit and can be efficiently solved using Newton`s method. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve the desired temporal accuracy, while simultaneously preserving the geometric structure of surface diffusion.