High order discontinuous Galerkin methods on surfaces

We derive and analyze high order discontinuous Galerkin methods for second-order elliptic problems on implicitely defined surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$. This is done by carefully adapting the unified discontinuous Galerkin framework of Arnold et al. [2002] on a triangulated surface approximating the smooth surface. We prove optimal error estimates in both a (mesh dependent) energy norm and the $L^2$ norm.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure

Adaptive discontinuous Galerkin methods on surfaces

We present a dual weighted residual-based a posteriori error estimate for a discontinuous Galerkin approximation of a surface partial differential equation. We restrict our analysis to a linear second-order elliptic problem posed on hypersurfaces in R3 which are implicitly represented as level sets of smooth functions. We show that the error in the energy norm may be split into a “residual part” and a higher order “geometric part”. Upper and lower bounds for the resulting a posteriori error estimator are proven and we consider a number of challenging test problems to demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of the estimator. We also present a novel “geometric” driven refinement strategy for PDEs on surfaces which considerably improves the performance of the method on complex surfaces