Asymptotic preserving methods for quasilinear hyperbolic systems with stiff relaxation: a review

Abstract

Hyperbolic systems with stiff relaxation constitute a wide class of evolutionary partial differential equations which describe several physical phenomena, ranging from gas dynamics to kinetic theory, from semiconductor modeling to traffic flow. Peculiar features of such systems is the presence of a small parameter that determines the smallest time scale of the system. As such parameter vanishes, the system relaxes to a different one with a smaller number of equations, and sometime of a different mathematical nature. The numerical solution of such systems may present some challenges, in particular if one is interested in capturing all regimes with the same numerical method, including the one in which the small parameter vanishes (relaxed system). The design, analysis and application of numerical schemes which are robust enough to solve this class of systems for arbitrary value of the small parameter is the subject of the current paper. We start presenting different classes of hyperbolic systems with relaxation, illustrate the properties of implicit–explicit (IMEX) Runge–Kutta schemes which are adopted for the construction of efficient methods for the numerical solution of the systems, and then illustrate how to apply IMEX schemes for the construction of asymptotic preserving schemes, i.e. scheme which correctly capture the behavior of the systems even when the relaxation parameter vanishes.