NONCLASSICAL SHOCKS AND KINETIC RELATIONS - SCALAR CONSERVATION-LAWS

This paper analyzes the non-classical shock waves which arise as limit s of certain diffusive-dispersive approximations to hyperbolic conserv ation laws. Such shocks occur for non-convex fluxes and connect region s 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 nonclassical shock waves, and construc t them as limits of traveling-wave solutions for several diffusive-dis persive 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 f or the Cauchy problem is investigated. Using numerical experiments, we demonstrate that, for the cubic flux-function, the Beam-Warming schem e 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.