Numerical Study on an RBF-FD Tangent Plane Based Method for Convection–Diffusion Equations on Anisotropic Evolving Surfaces

In this paper, we present a fully Lagrangian method based on the radial basis function (RBF) finite difference (FD) method for solving convection–diffusion partial differential equations (PDEs) on evolving surfaces. Surface differential operators are discretized by the tangent plane approach using Gaussian RBFs augmented with two-dimensional (2D) polynomials. The main advantage of our method is the simplicity of calculating differentiation weights. Additionally, we couple the method with anisotropic RBFs (ARBFs) to obtain more accurate numerical solutions for the anisotropic growth of surfaces. In the ARBF interpolation, the Euclidean distance is replaced with a suitable metric that matches the anisotropic surface geometry. Therefore, it will lead to a good result on the aspects of stability and accuracy of the RBF-FD method for this type of problem. The performance of this method is shown for various convection–diffusion equations on evolving surfaces, which include the anisotropic growth of surfaces and growth coupled with the solutions of PDEs.