Analysis and numerical treatment of bulk-surface reaction-diffusion models of Gierer-Meinhardt type

We consider a Gierer-Meinhardt system on a surface coupled with a parabolic PDE in the bulk, the domain confined by this surface. Such a model was recently proposed and analyzed for two-dimensional bulk domains by Gomez, Ward and Wei (SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 18, 2019). We prove the well-posedness o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-10
Main Authors: Jan-Phillip Bäcker, Röger, Matthias, Kuzmin, Dmitri
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Discretization
Domains
Fixed points (mathematics)
Flux corrected transport
Mathematical models
One dimensional models
Parabolic differential equations
Partial differential equations
Splitting
Surface reactions
Two dimensional analysis
Two dimensional models
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Summary:We consider a Gierer-Meinhardt system on a surface coupled with a parabolic PDE in the bulk, the domain confined by this surface. Such a model was recently proposed and analyzed for two-dimensional bulk domains by Gomez, Ward and Wei (SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 18, 2019). We prove the well-posedness of the bulk-surface system in arbitrary space dimensions and show that solutions remain uniformly bounded in parabolic H\"older spaces for all times. The proof uses Schauders fixed point theorem and a splitting in a surface and a bulk part. We also solve a reduced system, corresponding to the assumption of a well mixed bulk solution, numerically. We use operator-splitting methods which combine a finite element discretization of the Laplace-Beltrami operator with a positivity-preserving treatment of the source and sink terms. The proposed methodology is based on the flux-corrected transport (FCT) paradigm. It constrains the space and time discretization of the reduced problem in a manner which provides positivity preservation, conservation of mass, and second-order accuracy in smooth regions. The results of numerical studies for the system on a two-dimensional sphere demonstrate the occurrence of localized steady-state multispike pattern that have also been observed in one-dimensional models.
ISSN:2331-8422