Gas Dynamics Equations: Computation

Shock waves, vorticity waves, and entropy waves are fundamental discontinuity waves in nature and arise in supersonic or transonic gas flow, or from a very sudden release (explosion) of chemical, nuclear, electrical, radiation, or mechanical energy in a limited space. Tracking these discontinuities and their interactions, especially when and where new waves arise and interact in the motion of gases, is one of the main motivations for numerical computation for the gas dynamics equations. In this paper, we discuss some historic and recent developments, as well as mathematical challenges, in designing and formulating efficient numerical methods and algorithms to compute weak entropy solutions for the Euler equations for gas dynamics.