Volumetric variational principles for a class of partial differential equations defined on surfaces and curves (Q2319750)

The authors propose some numerical algorithms for partial differential equations defined on closed, smooth surfaces or curves. This setting includes in particular Laplace-Beltrami equations and surface wave equations. In the mathematical approach, the surfaces are defined implicitly by the distance functions or by the closest point mapping. Further, Euler-Lagrange equations are derived, including the boundary conditions that can be easily discretized on uniform Cartesian grids or on adaptive meshes. For elliptic and parabolic problems, it is shown that the boundary closure mostly yields stable algorithms to solve nonlinear surface PDEs. For hyperbolic problems, the proposed boundary closure is unstable in general, but the instability can be easily controlled with the help of an extra higher-order regularization term or by periodically but infrequently reinitializing the computed solutions. Numerical experiments are included to illustrate the theoretical findings.