Shock capturing by the spectral viscosity method

Abstract

A main disadvantage of using spectral methods for nonlinear conservation laws lies in the formation of Gibbs phenomenon, once spontaneous shock discontinuities appear in the solution. The global nature of spectral methods then pollutes the unstable Gibbs oscillations over all the computational domain, and the lack of entropy dissipation prevents convergences in these cases. In this paper, we discuss the spectral viscosity method, which is based on high frequency-dependent vanishing viscosity regularization of the classical spectral methods. We show that this method enforces the convergence of nonlinear spectral approximations without sacrificing their overall spectral accuracy.