A treatment of discontinuities for nonlinear systems with linearly degenerate fields

In this paper we propose an artificial compression technique to avoid the numerical diffusion that standard numerical methods present in contact discontinuities. The main idea is to replace contact discontinuities by shocks. For nonlinear 1D systems we replace locally linearly degenerate fields by genuinely nonlinear fields, in such a way the solution does not vary. We apply this technique to a family of numerical schemes and we deduce that this can be seen as a discretization of the system modified by a new term, when we are in a jump of a contact discontinuity. We have also extended this technique for the multidimensional case. We prove by applying the artificial compression technique that the numerical scheme is stable under the same CFL condition. We also present different numerical schemes: Sod’s problem for 1D Euler equations, transport of a discontinuity, a stationary contact discontinuity and in the multidimensional case the transversal transport of two different geometries. We observe that in all cases the numerical diffusion is reduced.