Local Characteristic Decomposition Based Central-Upwind Scheme

We propose novel less diffusive schemes for conservative one- and two-dimensional hyperbolic systems of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). The main challenges in the development of accurate and robust numerical methods for the studied systems come from the complicated wave structures, such as shocks, rarefactions and contact discontinuities, arising even for smooth initial conditions. In order to reduce the diffusion in the original central-upwind schemes, we use a local characteristic decomposition procedure to develop a new class of central-upwind schemes. We apply the developed schemes to the one- and two-dimensional Euler equations of gas dynamics to illustrate the performance on a variety of examples. The obtained numerical results clearly demonstrate that the proposed new schemes outperform the original central-upwind schemes.