English

Finite element exponential integration for rough solutions of nonlinear wave equations. Part II: Dynamic boundary conditions on curved domains

Numerical Analysis 2026-07-17 v1

Abstract

We study nonlinear wave equations with dynamic boundary conditions on smooth bounded domains and analyze a fully discrete approximation in the low-regularity regime. The method combines isoparametric bulk--surface finite elements of degree kk with an exponential integrator in time. Assuming only bounded energy of the exact solution, we prove convergence of the displacement--velocity pair in the weak norm L2(Ω;Γ)×H1(Ω;Γ)L^2(\Omega;\Gamma)\times H^{-1}(\Omega;\Gamma). The scheme achieves first-order convergence in time and spatial convergence of order h2/3h^{2/3} for k=1k=1 and h(k+2)/(k+3)h^{(k+2)/(k+3)} for k2k\ge 2. In particular, these rates show that higher-order finite elements retain a provable asymptotic advantage even at low regularity. A central difficulty is that the continuous and discrete bulk--surface problems are posed on different geometries and must therefore be compared directly in weak norms. To address this, we develop a weak-norm framework for non-conforming geometries based on lift and adjoint-lift operators, combined with a frequency-decomposition argument. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully discrete low-regularity convergence result for nonlinear wave equations with dynamic boundary conditions in a non-conforming bulk--surface finite element setting. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted rates and illustrate the improved efficiency of higher-order methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18320,
  title  = {Finite element exponential integration for rough solutions of nonlinear wave equations. Part II: Dynamic boundary conditions on curved domains},
  author = {Jiachuan Cao and Benjamin Dörich and Buyang Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18320},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

45 pages, 5 figures