Local existence and uniqueness of the dynamical equations of an incompressible membrane in two-dimensional space

The dynamics of a membrane is a coupled system of a moving elastic surface and an incompressible membrane fluid. The difficulties in analyzing such a system include the nonlinearity of the curved space (geometric nonlinearity), the nonlinearity of the fluid dynamics (fluid nonlinearity), and the coupling to the surface incompressibility. In the two-dimensional case, the fluid vanishes and the system reduces to a coupling of a wave equation and an elliptic equation. Here we prove the local existence and uniqueness of the solution to the system by constructing a suitable discrete scheme and proving the compactness of the discrete solutions. The risk of blowing up due to the geometric nonlinearity is overcome by the bending elasticity.

Keywords

Membrane, incompressible, existence, uniqueness, bending elasticity

2010 Mathematics Subject Classification

35M13, 65M12, 92C17

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Published 1 January 2010