Travelling Waves for Adaptive Grid Discretizations of Reaction Diffusion Systems I: Well-Posedness

In this paper we consider a spatial discretization scheme with an adaptive grid for the Nagumo PDE. In particular, we consider a commonly used time dependent moving mesh method that aims to equidistribute the arclength of the solution under consideration. We assume that the discrete analogue of this equidistribution is strictly enforced, which allows us to reduce the effective dynamics to a scalar non-local problem with infinite range interactions. We show that this reduced problem is well-posed and obtain useful estimates on the resulting nonlinearities. In the sequel papers (Hupkes and Van Vleck in Travelling waves for adaptive grid discretizations of reaction diffusion systems II: linear theory; Travelling waves for adaptive grid discretizations of reaction diffusion systems III: nonlinear theory) we use these estimates to show that travelling waves persist under these adaptive spatial discretizations.