A well-balanced finite volume scheme for a mixed hyperbolic/parabolic system to model chemotaxis (Q292559)

A finite volume scheme for the approximation of the weak solutions of a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) arising when modeling the movements of cells according to a chemoattractant concentration is presented. The PDE system turns out to couple a hyperbolic system with a diffusive equation, while the solutions of the model satisfy several properties that are preserved at the numerical level and explained in detail. The solutions may contain vacuum, satisfy steady regimes and asymptotic regimes. By deriving a judicious approximate Riemann solver, the finite volume method is designed in order to exactly preserve the steady regimes of particular physical interest. Moreover, the scheme is able to deal with vacuum regions and it preserves the asymptotic regimes. A series of numerical results of the method are used to illustrate the performance of the proposed numerical procedure.