Non-Classical Shocks and Kinetic Relations: Scalar Conservation Laws

Abstract

This paper analyzes the non-classical shock waves which arise as limits of certain diffusive-dispersive approximations to hyperbolic conservation laws. Such shocks occur for non-convex fluxes and connect regions of different convexity. They have negative entropy dissipation for a single convex entropy function, but not all convex entropies, and do not obey the classical Oleinik entropy criterion. We derive necessary conditions for the existence of non-classical shock waves, and construct them as limits of traveling-wave solutions for several diffusive-dispersive approximations.

We introduce a “kinetic relation” to act as a selection principle for choosing a unique non-classical solution to the Riemann problem. The convergence to non-classical weak solutions for the Cauchy problem is investigated. Using numerical experiments, we demonstrate that, for the cubic flux-function, the Beam-Warming scheme produces non-classical shocks while no such shocks are observed with the Lax-Wendroff scheme. All of these results depend crucially on the sign of the dispersion coefficient.