NUMERICAL TREATMENT OF WET/DRY FRONTS IN SHALLOW FLOWS WITH A MODIFIED ROE SCHEME

This paper deals with the analysis of some numerical difficulties related to the appearance of wet/dry fronts that may occur during the simulation of free-surface waves in shallow fluids. The fluid is supposed to be governed by the Shallow Water equations and the discretization of the equations is performed, when wet/dry fronts do not appear, by means of the Q-scheme of Roe upwinding the source terms introduced in Ref. 40. This scheme is well-balanced in the sense that it solves exactly stationary solutions corresponding to water at rest. Wet/dry fronts cannot be correctly treated with this scheme: it can produce negative values of the thickness of the fluid layer and stationary solutions corresponding to water at rest including wet/dry transitions are not exactly solved. In Refs. 3–5 some variants of this numerical scheme have been proposed that partially solve these difficulties. Here we propose a new variant: at intercells where wet/dry transitions occur, a Nonlinear Riemann Problem is considered instead of a Linear one. The exact solutions of these nonlinear problems, which are easy to calculate, are used in order to define the numerical fluxes. We investigate the properties of the resulting scheme and present some comparisons with the numerical results obtained with some other modified numerical schemes proposed previously.