The paper studies a higher order unfitted finite element method for the Stokes system posed on a surface in ℝ3. The method employs parametric Pk-Pk−1 finite element pairs on tetrahedral bulk mesh to discretize the Stokes system on embedded surface. Stability and optimal order convergence results are proved. The proofs include a complete quantification of geometric errors stemming from approximate parametric representation of the surface. Numerical experiments include formal convergence studies and an example of the Kelvin--Helmholtz instability problem on the unit sphere.

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The paper studies a geometrically unfitted finite element method (FEM), known as trace FEM or cut FEM, for the numerical solution of the Stokes system posed on a closed smooth surface. A trace FEM based on standard Taylor-Hood (continuous P 2 -P 1 ) bulk elements is proposed. A so-called volume normal derivative stabilization, known from the literature on trace FEM, is an essential ingredient of this method. The key result proved in the paper is an inf-sup stability of the trace P 2 -P 1 finite element pair, with the stability constant uniformly bounded with respect to the discretization parameter and the position of the surface in the bulk mesh. Optimal order convergence of a consistent variant of the finite element method follows from this new stability result and interpolation properties of the trace FEM. Properties of the method are illustrated with numerical examples.

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The paper considers a system of equations that models a lateral flow of a Boussinesq-Scriven fluid on a passively evolving surface embedded in R 3 . For the resulting Navier-Stokes type system, posed on a smooth closed time-dependent surface, we introduce a weak formulation in terms of functional spaces on a space-time manifold defined by the surface evolution. The weak formulation is shown to be well-posed for any finite final time and without smallness conditions on data. We further extend an unfitted finite element method, known as TraceFEM, to compute solutions to the fluid system. Convergence of the method is demonstrated numerically. In another series of experiments we visualize lateral flows induced by smooth deformations of a material surface.