Numerical computation of viscous profiles for hyperbolic conservation laws

Viscous profiles of shock waves in systems of conservation laws can be viewed as heteroclinic orbits in associated systems of ordinary differential equations (ODE). In the case of overcompressive shock waves, these orbits occur in multi-parameter families. We propose a numerical method to compute families of heteroclinic orbits in general systems of ODE. The key point is a special parameterization of the heteroclinic manifold which can be understood as a generalized phase condition; in the case of shock profiles, this phase condition has a natural interpretation regarding their stability. We prove that our method converges and present numerical results for several systems of conservation laws. These examples include traveling waves for the Navier-Stokes equations for compressible viscous, heat-conductive fluids and for the magnetohydrodynamics equations for viscous, heat-conductive, electrically resistive fluids that correspond to shock wave solutions of the associated ideal models, i.e., the Euler, resp. Lundquist, equations.