On a calculation method of the thickness via partial differential equations

Abstract

This paper presents a mathematical analysis of an elliptic partial differential equation (PDE) designed to compute the geometric thickness of a given shape. The PDE-based formulation provides a direct and systematic approach to evaluate thickness through the elliptic equation, whose solution yields a vector field from which the thickness is extracted as the divergence. While the convergence of this PDE-based thickness to the geometric thickness had been rigorously justified only for simple geometries such as intervals and straight bands, its validity for more general shapes remained open. In this work, we extend the analysis to annular domains, where curvature effects are nontrivial. We prove that the PDE-based thickness converges to the geometric thickness as the diffusion parameter tends to zero by estimating the difference between two notions of thickness with the square root of the diffusion parameter. Explicit expressions involving modified Bessel functions are obtained for annuli, together with sharp inequalities for their ratios. These results provide a rigorous mathematical foundation for the PDE-based thickness and demonstrate its potential as a reliable tool in shape analysis and topology optimization.