Numerical Treatment of the Loss of Hyperbolicity of the Two-Layer Shallow-Water System

This article is devoted to the numerical solution of the inviscid two-layer shallow water system. This system may lose the hyperbolic character when the shear between the layer is big enough. This loss of hyperbolicity is related to the appearance of shear instabilities that leads, in real flows, to intense mixing of the two layers that the model is not able to simulate. The strategy here is to add some extra friction terms, which are supposed to parameterize the loss of mechanical energy due to mixing, to get rid of this difficulty. The main goal is to introduce a technique allowing one to add locally and automatically an 'optimal' amount of shear stress to make the flow to remain in the hyperbolicity region. To do this, first an easy criterium to check the hyperbolicity of the system for a given state is proposed and checked. Next, we introduce a predictor/corrector strategy. In the predictor stage, a numerical scheme is applied to the system without extra friction. In the second stage, a discrete semi-implicit linear friction law is applied at any cell in which the predicted states are not in the hyperbolicity region. The coefficient of this law is calculated so that the predicted states are driven to the boundary of the hyperbolicity region according to the proposed criterium. The numerical scheme to be used at the first stage has to be able to advance in time in presence of complex eigenvalues: we propose here a family of path-conservative numerical scheme having this property. Finally, some numerical tests have been performed to assess the efficiency of the proposed strategy.