Capturing contact discontinuities in steady-state conservation laws (Q685835)

The discretisation of a steady conservation law on a unit square is considered to study the approximation properties of finite volume approximations with regard to contact discontinuities. In contrast to Dirichlet boundary conditions on the left and bottom side of the square domain, the use of outflow boundary conditions on the top and right side leads to an overdetermined system of equations for the finite volume residuals. Solving this system in the least square sense results in smeared discontinuities. If certain cells are removed from the mesh and triangular patches are added, the \(l_ 2\)-solution is much better behaved with regard to the resolution of discontinuities. It is shown that a solution in the \(l_ 1\)-sense is better behaved than the \(l_ 2\)-solution, and that the cell removement/enrichment by triangular cells- algorithm leads to an \(l_ 1\)-solution which is superior in resolution as compared to least square solutions.