Well-balanced schemes versus fractional step method for hyperbolic system with source terms (Q876740)

This paper is concerned with the investigation of the true accuracy of the fractional step method and the methods involving an upwinding of source terms when computing a simple hyperbolic model with source terms, which describes the motion of two-phase flows including source terms. The authors analyze the strategy of upwinding the source terms and compare it with the standard fractional step method. A first scheme relies on the usual fractional step approach, while a second scheme applies for upwinding of source terms, which, however, does not provide satisfactory results when computing certain specific unsteady cases. This motivates thus the authors to introduce a third scheme, which is similar to the previous but aims at providing an increased accuracy on coarse meshes when computing highly unsteady flows. The introduced scheme is based on a slight modification of the standard well-balanced scheme. A detailed numerical study which includes a measure of the \(L^1\) norm of the error is given.