STABILIZED FINITE ELEMENT APPROXIMATION OF THE MEAN CURVATURE VECTOR ON CLOSED SURFACES

• The mean curvature vector of a surface is obtained by letting the Laplace-Beltrami operator act on the embedding of the surface in R-3. In this contribution we develop a stabilized finite element approximation of the mean curvature vector of certain piecewise linear surfaces which enjoys first order convergence in L-2. The stabilization involves the jump in the tangent gradient in the direction of the outer co-normals at each edge in the surface mesh. We consider both standard meshed surfaces and so-called cut surfaces that are level sets of piecewise linear distance functions. We prove a priori error estimates and verify the theoretical results numerically.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik -- Matematisk analys (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics -- Mathematical Analysis (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik -- Beräkningsmatematik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics -- Computational Mathematics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Laplace-Beltrami

tangential calculus

discrete curvature

continuous interior penalty

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)