A structure-preserving parametric finite element method for geometric flows with anisotropic surface energy

Abstract

We propose and analyze a structure-preserving parametric finite element method (SP-PFEM) for the evolution of a closed curve under different geometric flows with arbitrary anisotropic surface energy density \(\gamma (\varvec{n})\), where \(\varvec{n}\in \mathbb {S}^1\) represents the outward unit normal vector. We begin with the anisotropic surface diffusion which possesses two well-known geometric structures—area conservation and energy dissipation—during the evolution of the closed curve. By introducing a novel surface energy matrix \(\varvec{G}_k(\varvec{n})\) depending on \(\gamma (\varvec{n})\) and the Cahn-Hoffman \(\varvec{\xi }\)-vector as well as a nonnegative stabilizing function \(k(\varvec{n})\), we obtain a new conservative geometric partial differential equation and its corresponding variational formulation for the anisotropic surface diffusion. Based on the new weak formulation, we propose a full discretization by adopting the parametric finite element method for spatial discretization and a semi-implicit temporal discretization with a proper and clever approximation for the outward normal vector. Under a mild and natural condition on \(\gamma (\varvec{n})\), we can prove that the proposed full discretization is structure-preserving, i.e. it preserves the area conservation and energy dissipation at the discretized level, and thus it is unconditionally energy stable. The proposed SP-PFEM is then extended to simulate the evolution of a close curve under other anisotropic geometric flows including anisotropic curvature flow and area-conserved anisotropic curvature flow. Extensive numerical results are reported to demonstrate the efficiency and unconditional energy stability as well as good mesh quality (and thus no need to re-mesh during the evolution) of the proposed SP-PFEM for simulating anisotropic geometric flows.