RBF-LOI: Augmenting Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) with Least Orthogonal Interpolation (LOI) for solving PDEs on surfaces

We present a new method for the solution of PDEs on manifolds M⊂Rd of co-dimension one using stable scale-free radial basis function (RBF) interpolation. Our method involves augmenting polyharmonic spline (PHS) RBFs with polynomials to generate RBF-finite difference (RBF-FD) formulas. These polynomial basis elements are obtained using the recently-developed least orthogonal interpolation technique (LOI) on each RBF-FD stencil to obtain local restrictions of polynomials in R3 to stencils on M. The resulting RBF-LOI method uses Cartesian coordinates, does not require any intrinsic coordinate systems or projections of points onto tangent planes, and our tests illustrate robustness to stagnation errors. We show that our method produces high orders of convergence for PDEs on the sphere and torus, and present some applications to reaction-diffusion PDEs motivated by biology.