Abstract: | This paper presents a preconditioning technique for solving a two‐dimensional system of hyperbolic equations. The main attractive feature of this approach is that, unlike a technique based on simply extending the solver for a one‐dimensional hyperbolic system, convergence and stability analysis can be investigated. This method represents a genuine numerical algorithm for multi‐dimensional hyperbolic systems. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, applications to solving a two‐dimensional system of Euler equations in supersonic flows are reported. It is shown that the Lax–Friedrichs scheme diverges when applied to the original Euler equations. However, convergence is achieved when the same numerical scheme is employed using the same CFL number to solve the equivalent preconditioned Euler system. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |