Numerical schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws with stiff relaxation terms

Hyperbolic systems often have relaxation terms that give them a partially conservative form and that lead to a long-time behavior governed by reduced systems that are parabolic in nature. In this article it is shown by asymptotic analysis and numerical examples that semidiscrete high resolution methods for hyperbolic conservation laws fail to capture this asymptotic behavior unless the small relaxation rate is resolved by a fine spatial grid. We introduce a modification of higher order Godunov methods that possesses the correct asymptotic behavior, allowing the use of coarse grids (large cell Peclet numbers). The idea is to build into the numerical scheme the asymptotic balances that lead to this behavior. Numerical experiments on 2 x 2 systems verify our analysis. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.