On the Computation of Roll Waves
The phenomenon of roll waves occurs in a uniform open-channel flow down an incline, when the Froude number is above two. The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of numerical approximations to a model roll wave equation ut + uux = u,u(x,0) = u0(x), which arises as a weakly nonlinear approximation of the shallow water equations. The main difficulty associated with the numerical approximation of this problem is its linear instability. Numerical round-off error can easily overtake the...