Local Well-Posedness for Volume-Preserving Mean Curvature and Willmore Flows with Line Tension

Abstract

We show the short-time existence and uniqueness of solutions for the motion of an evolving hypersurface in contact with a solid container driven by volume-preserving mean curvature flow (MCF) taking line tension effects on the boundary into account. Difficulties arise due to dynamic boundary conditions and due to the contact angle and the non-local nature of the resulting second order, nonlinear PDE. In addition, we prove the same result for the Willmore flow with line tension, which results in a nonlinear PDE of fourth order. For both flows we will use a Hanzawa transformation to write the flows as graphs over a fixed reference hypersurface.