An adaptive mesh finite volume method for the Euler equations of gas dynamics

Abstract

The Euler equations have been used to model gas dynamics for decades. They consist of mathematical equations for the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy of the gas. For a large time value, the solution may contain discontinuities, even when the initial condition is smooth. A standard finite volume numerical method is not able to give accurate solutions to the Euler equations around discontinuities. Therefore we solve the Euler equations using an adaptive mesh finite volume method. In this paper, we present a new construction of the adaptive mesh finite volume method with an efficient computation of the refinement indicator. The adaptive method takes action automatically at around places having inaccurate solutions. Inaccurate solutions are reconstructed to reduce the error by refining the mesh locally up to a certain level. On the other hand, if the solution is already accurate, then the mesh is coarsened up to another certain level to minimize computational efforts. We implement the numerical entropy production as the mesh refinement indicator. As a test problem, we take the Sod shock tube problem. Numerical results show that the adaptive method is more promising than the standard one in solving the Euler equations of gas dynamics.