Finite element methods on surfaces

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to improve numerical simulations of surface problems. Two novel computational concepts are analyzed and applied on two surface problems; minimal surface problems and elastic membrane problems. The concept of tangential projection implies that direct computation on the surface is made possible compared to the classical approach of mapping 2D parametric surfaces to 3D surfaces by means of differential geometry operators. The second concept presented is the cut finite element method, in which the basic idea of discretization is to embed the d- 1-dimensional surface in a d-dimensional mesh and use the basis functions of a higher dimensional mesh but integrate over the surface. The aim of this thesis is to present the basics of the two main approaches and to provide details on the implementation.