Convergence analysis for the Barrett-Garcke-Nurnberg method of transport type

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a Barrett-Garcke-Nurnberg (BGN) method for evolving geometries under general flows and present the corresponding convergence analysis. Specifically, we examine the scenario where a closed curve evolves according to a prescribed background velocity field. Unlike mean curvature flow and surface diffusion, where the evolution velocities inherently exhibit parabolicity, this case is dominated by transport which poses a significant difficulty in establishing convergence proofs. To address the challenges imposed by this transport-dominant nature, we derive several discrete energy estimates of the transport type on discretized polynomial surfaces within the framework of the projection error. The use of the projection error is indispensable as it provides crucial additional stability through its orthogonality structure. We prove that the proposed method converges sub-optimally in the L2 norm, and this is the first convergence proof for a fully discrete numerical method solving the evolution of curves driven by general flows.