A high-order, meshless, Lagrangian--Eulerian RBF-FD method for advection--diffusion--reaction on moving manifolds

Abstract

We present a high-order radial basis function-generated finite difference (RBF-FD) method for partial differential equations on moving manifolds $\mathcal M(t)\subset\mathbb R^3$ of co-dimension one. Our method builds on the tangent-plane formulation of surface RBF-FD and combines Lagrangian and Eulerian treatments: the manifold and material derivative are evolved in a Lagrangian fashion, while the remaining surface differential operators are reconstructed on the instantaneous point cloud and stabilized, when necessary, by a quasi-analytical hyperviscosity formulation. Lagrangian marker drift is handled by adaptive rearrangement using a compact global parametric model of the moving surface, which also supplies accurate normals and geometry-based quadrature. After rearrangement, we reconstruct the multistep history by backward semi-Lagrangian tracing and interpolation before resuming the Lagrangian time discretization. We exploit temporal coherence through three update strategies: defect correction for the local RBF-FD weights, a curvature-based update of the hyperviscosity coefficients between spectral recomputations, and a global defect-correction iteration that reuses an incomplete LU (ILU) factorization before preconditioned generalized minimal residual (GMRES) iterations. Finally, we enforce the prescribed global mass balance through a scalar projection based on the evolving surface quadrature. Numerical experiments demonstrate high-order convergence, conservation to roundoff in source-free problems, stable long-time integration, and substantial savings from the proposed update strategies.