Error analysis for temporal second-order finite element approximations of axisymmetric mean curvature flow of genus-1 surfaces

Abstract: Existing studies on the convergence of numerical methods for curvature flows primarily focus on first-order temporal schemes. In this paper, we establish a novel error analysis for parametric finite element approximations of genus-1 axisymmetric mean curvature flow, formulated using two classical second-order time-stepping methods: the Crank-Nicolson method and the BDF2 method. Our results establish optimal error bounds in both the L^2-norm and H^1-norm, along with a superconvergence result in the H^1-norm for each fully discrete approximation. Finally, we perform convergence experiments to validate the theoretical findings and present numerical simulations for various genus-1 surfaces. Through a series of comparative experiments, we also demonstrate that the methods proposed in this paper exhibit significant mesh advantages.