Journal
JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS
Volume 229, Issue 18, Pages 6585-6612Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcp.2010.05.014
Keywords
Lipid bilayer; Multi-component membrane; Phase field method; Relaxation dynamics; Numerical simulation; Surface finite element method
Funding
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [STI 579/1-1, 2]
- UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/G010404]
- EPSRC [EP/G010404/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/G010404/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Biomembranes consisting of multiple lipids may involve phase separation phenomena leading to coexisting domains of different lipid compositions. The modeling of such biomembranes involves an elastic or bending energy together with a line energy associated with the phase interfaces. This leads to a free boundary problem for the phase interface on the unknown equilibrium surface which minimizes an energy functional subject to volume and area constraints. In this paper we propose a new computational tool for computing equilibria based on an L(2) relaxation flow for the total energy in which the line energy is approximated by a surface Ginzburg-Landau phase field functional. The relaxation dynamics couple a nonlinear fourth order geometric evolution equation of Willmore flow type for the membrane with a surface Allen-Cahn equation describing the lateral decomposition. A novel system is derived involving second order elliptic operators where the field variables are the positions of material points of the surface, the mean curvature vector and the surface phase field function. The resulting variational formulation uses HI spaces, and we employ triangulated surfaces and H(1) conforming quadratic surface finite elements for approximating solutions. Together with a semi-implicit time discretization of the evolution equations an iterative scheme is obtained essentially requiring linear solvers only. Numerical experiments are presented which exhibit convergence and the power of this new method for two component geometric biomembranes by computing equilibria such as dumbbells, discocytes and starfishes with lateral phase separation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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