A note on Poincar\'e- and Friedrichs-type inequalities

We introduce a simple criterion to check coercivity of bilinear forms on subspaces of Hilbert-spaces. The presented criterion allows to derive many standard and non-standard variants of Poincar\'e- and Friedrichs-type inequalities with very little effort

CRC 1114 - Report Membrane Deformation by N-BAR Proteins: Extraction of membrane geometry and protein diffusion characteristics from MD simulations

We describe simulations of Proteins and artificial pseudo-molecules interacting and shaping lipid bilayer membranes. We extract protein diffusion Parameters, membrane deformation profiles and the elastic properties of the used membrane models in preparation of calculations based on a large scale continuum model

Nonsmooth Schur-Newton methods for vector-valued Cahn-Hilliard equations

We present globally convergent nonsmooth Schur-Newton methods for the solution of discrete vector-valued Cahn-Hilliard equations with logarithmic and obstacle potentials. The method solves the nonlinear set-valued saddle-point problems as arising from discretization by implicit Euler methods in time and first order finite elements in space without regularization. Efficiency and robustness of the convergence speed for vanishing temperature is illustrated by numerical experiments

Truncated Nonsmooth Newton Multigrid for phase-field brittle-fracture problems

We propose the Truncated Nonsmooth Newton Multigrid Method (TNNMG) as a solver for the spatial problems of the small-strain brittle-fracture phase-field equations. TNNMG is a nonsmooth multigrid method that can solve biconvex, block-separably nonsmooth minimization problems in roughly the time of solving one linear system of equations. It exploits the variational structure inherent in the problem, and handles the pointwise irreversibility constraint on the damage variable directly, without penalization or the introduction of a local history field. Memory consumption is significantly lower compared to approaches based on direct solvers. In the paper we introduce the method and show how it can be applied to several established models of phase-field brittle fracture. We then prove convergence of the solver to a solution of the nonsmooth Euler-Lagrange equations of the spatial problem for any load and initial iterate. Numerical comparisons to an operator-splitting algorithm show a speed increase of more than one order of magnitude, without loss of robustness

A Variational Approach to Particles in Lipid Membranes

A variety of models for the membrane-mediated interaction of particles in lipid membranes, mostly well-established in theoretical physics, is reviewed from a mathematical perspective. We provide mathematically consistent formulations in a variational framework, relate apparently different modelling approaches in terms of successive approximation, and investigate existence and uniqueness. Numerical computations illustrate that the new variational formulations are directly accessible to effective numerical methods