English

Orthogonal signed-distance coordinates and vector calculus near evolving curves and surfaces

Mathematical Physics 2023-10-27 v2 Materials Science Differential Geometry math.MP Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

We provide an elementary derivation of an orthogonal coordinate system for boundary layers around evolving smooth surfaces and curves based on the signed-distance function. We go beyond previous works on the signed-distance function and collate useful vector calculus identities for these coordinates. These results and provided code enable consistent accounting of geometric effects in the derivation of boundary layer asymptotics for a wide range of physical systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.02891,
  title  = {Orthogonal signed-distance coordinates and vector calculus near evolving curves and surfaces},
  author = {Eric W. Hester and Geoffrey M. Vasil},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.02891},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

24 pages, 3 figures, Mathematica code available at https://github.com/ericwhester/signed-distance-code

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:33:10.693Z