Adaptive discontinuous Galerkin methods for elliptic interface problems

An interior-penalty discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method for an elliptic interface problem involving, possibly, curved interfaces, with flux-balancing interface conditions, e.g., modelling mass transfer of solutes through semi-permeable membranes, is considered. The method allows for extremely general curved element shapes employed to resolve the interface geometry exactly. A residual-type a posteriori error estimator for this dG method is proposed and upper and lower bounds of the error in the respective dG-energy norm are proven. The a posteriori error bounds are subsequently used to prove a basic a priori convergence result. The theory presented is complemented by a series of numerical experiments. The presented approach applies immediately to the case of curved domains with non-essential boundary conditions, too.