Tracking a sharp crested wave front in hyperbolic heat transfer

In this article we investigate the numerical oscillations encountered when approximating the solution to the hyperbolic heat conduction equation. We consider a benchmark problem and show that it is not well-posed, unless a jump condition is specified. The alternative is to “smooth” the jump which leads to a sharp crested wave front, but with no discontinuity. To track the wave front we split the problem into auxiliary problems and solve these using different methods. The resulting solution is oscillation-free.