“…Concerning the numerical approximation of ropes and membranes based on the Surface and Trace FEM as discussed herein, it is mentioned that the Trace FEM just as any other FDM simplifies the meshing of geometries significantly. However, additional effort is required for (i) the integration of the weak form, wherefore suitable integration points on the manifolds have to be provided [18,34,19,21], (ii) the application of boundary conditions which is more involved because the boundary is within the background elements and instead of prescribing nodal values one may have to use Nitsche's method [6,3,26,41,40] or other approaches for enforcing constraints, and (iii) stabilization terms which are necessary to address the existence of shape functions with small supports on the manifolds and to find unique solutions with the background mesh although the BVP is only defined on the manifold [32,24,7,25]. In spite of the increased effort for implementing the Trace FEM, it may have significant advantages over the Surface FEM.…”