Transport‐equilibrium schemes for computing nonclassical shocks. Scalar conservation laws

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a new numerical strategy for computing the nonclassical weak solutions of scalar conservation laws which fail to be genuinely nonlinear. We concentrate on the typical situation of concave–convex and convex–concave flux functions. In such situations the so‐called nonclassical shocks, violating the classical Oleinik entropy criterion and selected by a prescribed kinetic relation, naturally arise in the resolution of the Riemann problem. Enforcing the kinetic relation from a numerical point of view is known to be a crucial but challenging issue. By means of an algorithm made of two steps, namely an Equilibrium step and a Transport step, we show how to force the validity of the kinetic relation at the discrete level. The proposed strategy is based on the use of a numerical flux function and random numbers. We prove that the resulting scheme enjoys important consistency properties. Numerous numerical evidences illustrate the validity of our approach. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2008