Well-posedness of a Pulsed Electric Field Model in Biological Media and its Finite Element Approximation

This work aims at providing a mathematical and numerical framework for the analysis on the effects of pulsed electric fields on biological media. Biological tissues and cell suspensions are described as having a heteregeneous permittivity and a heteregeneous conductivity. Well-posedness of the model problem and the regularity of its solution are established. A fully discrete finite element scheme is proposed for the numerical approximation of the potential distribution as a function of time and space simultaneously for an arbitrary shaped pulse, and it is demonstrated to enjoy the optimal convergence order in both space and time. The proposed numerical scheme has potential applications in the fields of medicine, food sciences, and biotechnology.