Solving partial differential equations on (evolving) surfaces with radial basis functions

Meshfree, kernel-based spatial discretisations are recent tools to discretise partial differential equations on surfaces. The goals of this paper are to analyse and compare three different meshfree kernel-based methods for the spatial discretisation of semi-linear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) on surfaces, i.e. on smooth, compact, connected, orientable, and closed (d − 1)-dimensional submanifolds of ℝd\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$\mathbb {R}^{d}$\end{document}. The three different methods are collocation, the Galerkin, and the RBF-FD method, respectively. Their advantages and drawbacks are discussed, and previously known theoretical results are extended and numerically verified. Finally, a significant part of this paper is devoted to solving PDEs on evolving surfaces with RBF-FD, which has not been done previously.