Vorträge

I will first give a brief description of finite-volume, Godunov-type methods for hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. These methods consist of two types of schemes: upwind and central. My lecture will focus on the second type -- non-oscillatory central schemes.

Godunov-type schemes are projection-evolution methods. In these methods, the solution, at each time step, is interpolated by a (discontinuous) piecewise polynomial interpolant, which is then evolved to the next time level using the integral form of conservation laws. Therefore, in order to design an upwind scheme, (generalized) Riemann problems have to be (approximately) solved at each cell interface. This however may be hard or even impossible.

The main idea in the derivation of central schemes is to avoid solving Riemann problems by averaging over the wave fans generated at cell interfaces. This strategy leads to a family of universal numerical methods that can be applied as a black-box-solver to a wide variety of hyperbolic PDEs and related problems. At the same time, central schemes suffer from (relatively) high numerical viscosity, which can be reduced by incorporating of some upwinding information into the scheme derivation -- this leads to central-upwind schemes, which will be presented in the lecture.

During the talk, I will show a number of recent applications of the central schemes.

Uniqueness for weak solutions of conservation laws is based on the sign of the entropy production across discontinuos solutions. Although the entropy plays a fundamental role in the theory of hyperbolic systems, it is generally not used as a computational tool.
In this talk I describe how the numerical production of entropy induced by the discretization of the equations is a reliable indicator of the quality of the numerical solution. Thus the entropy production can be used as a regularity indicator, identifying the cells in which non linear limiters must be used to prevent the onset of spurious oscillations.
More quantitatively, when the solution is smooth, the entropy production has the same size of the local truncation error and can therefore be used as an a-posteriori error indicator to drive the construction of adaptive grids.

We start with a brief introduction to Conservation Laws and to their numerical solutions. Then we discuss the construction and manipulation of non-uniform meshes, using geometric properties of the numerical solution under consideration. Next, we examine properties (such as consistency, stability and order of accuracy) of numerical schemes over both uniform and non-uniform meshes. Finally, we combine a proper mesh selection mechanism with Entropy Conservative or oscillatory numerical schemes for the evolution step.