A well-balanced scheme to capture non-explicit steady states in the Euler equations with gravity

This paper describes a numerical discretization of the compressible Euler equations with a gravitational potential. A pertinent feature of the solutions to these inhomogeneous equations is the special case of stationary solutions with zero velocity, described by a nonlinear PDE, whose solutions are called hydrostatic equilibria. We present a well-balanced method, meaning that besides discretizing the complete equations the method is also able to maintain all hydrostatic equilibria. The method is a finite volume method, whose Riemann solver is approximated by a so-called relaxation Riemann solution that takes all hydrostatic equilibria into account. Relaxation ensure robustness, accuracy and stability of our method, since it satisfies discrete entropy inequalities. We will present numerical examples, illustrating that our method works as promised. Copyright c © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.