TY - JOUR T1 - High-Order Fully Discrete Energy Diminishing Evolving Surface Finite Element Methods for a Class of Geometric Curvature Flows AU - Beiping Duan , AU - Buyang Li , AU - Zhang , Zhimin JO - Annals of Applied Mathematics VL - 4 SP - 405 EP - 436 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/12 SN - 37 DO - http://doi.org/10.4208/aam.OA-2021-0007 UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/aam/20091.html KW - Gradient flow, evolving surface, curvature, energy decay, evolving surface, finite element method, averaged vector-field collocation. AB -

This article concerns the construction of high-order energy-decaying numerical methods for gradient flows of evolving surfaces with curvature-dependent energy functionals. The semidiscrete evolving surface finite element method is derived based on the calculus of variation of the semidiscrete surface energy functional. This makes the semidiscrete problem naturally inherit the energy decay structure. With this property, the semidiscrete problem is furthermore formulated as a gradient flow system of ODEs. The averaged vector-field collocation method is used for time discretization of the ODEs to preserve energy decay at the fully discrete level while achieving high-order accuracy in time. Extensive numerical examples are provided to illustrate the accuracy and energy diminishing property of the proposed method, as well as the effectiveness of the method in capturing singularities in the evolution of closed surfaces.