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This paper is devoted to the numerical approximation of the solutions of a system of conservation laws arising in the modeling of two-phase flows in pipelines. The PDEs are closed by two highly nonlinear algebraic relations, namely, a pressure law and a hydrodynamic one. The severe nonlinearities encoded in these laws make the classical approximate Riemann solvers virtually intractable at a reasonable cost of evaluation. We propose a strategy for relaxing solely these two nonlinearities. The relaxation system we introduce is of course hyperbolic but all associated eigenfields are linearly degenerate. Such a property not only makes it trivial to solve the Riemann problem but also enables us to enforce some further stability requirements, in addition to those coming from a Chapman-Enskog analysis. The new method turns out to be fairly simple and robust while achieving desirable positivity properties on the density and the mass fractions. Extensive numerical evidences are provided.

This paper is devoted to the numerical analysis of some finite volume discretizations of Darcy's equations. We propose two finite volume schemes on unstructured meshes and prove their equivalence with either conforming or nonconforming finite element discrete problems. This leads to optimal a priori error estimates. In view of mesh adaptivity, we exhibit residual type error indicators and prove estimates which allow to compare them with the error in a very accurate way.

For the high-order numerical approximation of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, we propose to use as a building principle an entropy diminishing criterion instead of the familiar total variation diminishing criterion introduced by Harten for scalar equations. Based on this new criterion, we derive entropy diminishing projections that ensure, both, the second order of accuracy and all of the classical discrete entropy inequalities. The resulting scheme is a nonlinear version of the classical Van Leer's MUSCL scheme. Strong convergence of this second order, entropy satisfying scheme is proved for systems of two equations. Numerical tests demonstrate the interest of our theory.