Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations

The following chapters summarize lectures given in March 2001 during the summerschool on Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations which took place at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg in Germany. This type of meeting is originally funded by the Volkswa genstiftung in Hannover (Germany) with the aim to bring together well-known leading experts from special mathematical, physical and engineering fields of interest with PhD students, members of Scientific Research Institutes as well as people from Industry, in order to learn and discuss modern theoretical and numerical developments. Hyperbolic partial differential equations play an important role in various applications from natural sciences and engineering. Starting from the classical Euler equations in fluid dynamics, several other hyperbolic equations arise in traffic flow problems, acoustics, radiation transfer, crystal growth etc. The main interest is concerned with nonlinear hyperbolic problems and the special structures, which are characteristic for solutions of these equations, like shock and rarefaction waves as well as entropy solutions. As a consequence, even numerical schemes for hyperbolic equations differ significantly from methods for elliptic and parabolic equations: the transport of information runs along the characteristic curves of a hyperbolic equation and consequently the direction of transport is of constitutive importance. This property leads to the construction of upwind schemes and the theory of Riemann solvers. Both concepts are combined with explicit or implicit time stepping techniques whereby the chosen order of accuracy usually depends on the expected dynamic of the underlying solution.