A parametrix for the surface Stokes equation

Abstract

We introduce an integral equation formulation of the surface Stokes equations, constructed using two-dimensional Stokeslets. The resulting integral equations are Fredholm integral equations of the second kind and can be discretized to high order using standard tools. Since the resulting discrete linear systems are dense, we describe and analyze a proxy shell method to construct fast direct solvers for these systems. The properties of our integral equation, and the performance of the resulting numerical scheme, are illustrated with several representative numerical examples.