High-order finite element methods for nonlinear convection-diffusion equation on time-varying domain

A high-order finite element method is proposed to solve the nonlinear convection-diffusion equation on a time-varying domain whose boundary is implicitly driven by the solution of the equation. The method is semi-implicit in the sense that the boundary is traced explicitly with a high-order surface-tracking algorithm, while the convection-diffusion equation is solved implicitly with high-order backward differentiation formulas and fictitious-domain finite element methods. By two numerical experiments for severely deforming domains, we show that optimal convergence orders are obtained in energy norm for third-order and fourth-order methods.