On the composite Riemann problem for multi‐material fluid flows

We develop an Eulerian fixed grid numerical method for calculating multi‐material fluid flows. This approach relates to the class of interface capturing methods. The fluid is treated as a heterogeneous mixture of constituent materials, and the material interface is implicitly captured by a region of mixed cells that have arisen owing to numerical diffusion. To suppress this numerical diffusion, we propose a composite Riemann problem (CRP), which describes the decay of an initial discontinuity in the presence of a contact point between two different fluids, which is located off the initial discontinuity point. The solution to the CRP serves to calculate multi‐material no mixed numerical flux without introducing any material diffusion. We discuss the CRP solution and its implementation in the multi‐material fluid Godunov method. Numerical results show that a simple framework of the CRP greatly improves capturing material interfaces in the Godunov method and reproduces many of the advantages of more complicated interface tracking multi‐material treatments. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.