Convergence of a Godunov scheme for conservation laws with a discontinuous flux lacking the crossing condition

Abstract

We study a scalar conservation law whose flux has a single spatial discontinuity. There are many notions of (entropy) solution, the relevant concept being determined by the application. We focus on the so-called vanishing viscosity solution. We utilize a Kružkov-type entropy inequality which generalizes the one in [K. H. Karlsen, N. H. Risebro and J. D. Towers, [Formula: see text]-stability for entropy solutions of nonlinear degenerate parabolic convection–diffusion equations with discontinuous coefficients, Skr. K. Nor. Vidensk. Selsk. 3 (2003) 1–49], singles out the vanishing viscosity solution whether or not the crossing condition is satisfied, and has a discrete version satisfied by the Godunov variant of the finite difference scheme of [S. Diehl, On scalar conservation laws with point source and discontinuous flux function, SIAM J. Math. Anal. 26(6) (1995) 1425–1451]. We show that the solutions produced by that scheme converge to the unique vanishing viscosity solution. The scheme does not require a Riemann solver for the discontinuous flux problem. This makes its implementation simple even when the flux is multimodal, and there are multiple flux crossings.