Shock capturing by the spectral viscosity method (Q806988)

This paper is concerned with spectral methods for solving nonlinear one- dimensional conservation laws. An example is used to show that when shock discontinuities appear, the standard spectral approximations cannot converge to the solution satisfying the entropy condition because of the unstable Gibbs oscillations. This is related to the lack of entropy dissipation in the spectral approximations. The paper discusses the spectral viscosity method which is based on high frequency-dependent vanishing viscosity regularization of the classical spectral methods. The convergence of the spectral viscosity method is discussed and numerical results are used to show that the approximation it produces can be used to recover with spectral accuracy the pointwise values of the exact entropy solution.