Pure mathematics

Vortex

Curl (programming language)

Computer science

Surface (topology)

Thermodynamics

Physics

Stream function

Differential form

Mathematics

Vorticity

Mathematical analysis

Geometry

Programming language

Vector field

IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis

In this paper we present a derivation of the surface Helmholtz decomposition, discuss its relation to the surface Hodge decomposition and derive a well-posed stream function formulation of a class of surface Stokes problems. We consider a $C^2$ connected (not necessarily simply connected) oriented hypersurface $\varGamma \subset \mathbb{R}^3$ without boundary. The surface gradient, divergence, curl and Laplace operators are defined in terms of the standard differential operators of the ambient Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^3$. These representations are very convenient for the implementation of numerical methods for surface partial differential equations. We introduce surface $\mathbf H({\mathop{\rm div}}_{\varGamma})$ and $\mathbf H({\mathop{\rm curl}}_{\varGamma})$ spaces and derive useful properties of these spaces. A main result of the paper is the derivation of the Helmholtz decomposition, in terms of these surface differential operators, based on elementary differential calculus. As a corollary of this decomposition we obtain that for a simply connected surface to every tangential divergence-free velocity field there corresponds a unique scalar stream function. Using this result the variational form of the surface Stokes equation can be reformulated as a well-posed variational formulation of a fourth-order equation for the stream function. The latter can be rewritten as two coupled second-order equations, which form the basis for a finite element discretization. A particular finite element method is explained and the results of a numerical experiment with this method are presented.

Stream function formulation of surface Stokes equations