We consider the system of partial differential equations governing the one-dimensional flow of two superposed immiscible layers of shallow water. The difficulty in this system comes from the coupling terms involving some derivatives of the unknowns that make the system nonconservative, and eventually nonhyperbolic. Due to these terms, a numerical scheme obtained by performing an arbitrary scheme to each layer, and using time-splitting or other similar techniques leads to instabilities in general. Here we use entropy inequalities in order to control the stability. We introduce a stable well-balanced time-splitting scheme for the two-layer shallow water system that satisfies a fully discrete entropy inequality. In contrast with Roe type solvers, it does not need the computation of eigenvalues, which is not simple for the two-layer shallow water system. The solver has the property to keep the water heights nonnegative, and to be able to treat vanishing values.

We develop path-conservative central-upwind schemes for nonconservative one-dimensional hyperbolic systems of nonlinear partial differential equations. Such systems arise in a variety of applications and the most challenging part of their numerical discretization is a robust treatment of nonconservative product terms. Godunov-type central-upwind schemes were developed as an efficient, highly accurate and robust ``black-box’’ solver for hyperbolic systems of conservation and balance laws. They were successfully applied to a large number of hyperbolic systems including several nonconservative ones. To overcome the difficulties related to the presence of nonconservative product terms, several special techniques were proposed. However, none of these techniques was sufficiently robust and thus the applicability of the original central-upwind schemes was rather limited. In this paper, we rewrite the central-upwind schemes in the form of path-conservative schemes. This helps us (i) to show that the main drawback of the original central-upwind approach was the fact that the jump of the nonconservative product terms across cell interfaces has never been taken into account and (ii) to understand how the nonconservative products should be discretized so that their influence on the numerical solution is accurately taken into account. The resulting path-conservative central-upwind scheme is a new robust tool for both conservative and nonconservative hyperbolic systems. We apply the new scheme to the Saint-Venant system with discontinuous bottom topography and two-layer shallow water system. Our numerical results illustrate the good performance of the new path-conservative central-upwind scheme, its robustness and ability to achieve very high resolution.

We consider the Saint-Venant system for shallow water flows with nonflat bottom. In past years, efficient well-balanced methods have been proposed in order to well resolve solutions close to steady states at rest. Here we describe a strategy based on a local subsonic steady state reconstruction that allows one to derive a subsonic-well-balanced scheme, preserving exactly all the subsonic steady states. It generalizes the now well-known hydrostatic solver, and like the latter it preserves the nonnegativity of the water height and satisfies a semidiscrete entropy inequality. An application to the Euler–Poisson system is proposed.

We present a model for hyperpycnal plumes or turbidity currents that takes into account the interaction between the turbidity current and the bottom, considering deposition and erosion effects as well as solid transport of particles at the bed load due to the current. Water entrainment from the ambient water in which the turbidity current plunges is also considered. Motion of ambient water is neglected and the rigid lid assumption is considered. The model is obtained as a depth-average system of equations under the shallow water hypothesis describing the balance of fluid mass, sediment mass and mean ow. The character of the system is analyzed and numerical simulations are carried out using finite volume schemes and path-conservative Roe schemes