We prove the convergence of vortex blob methods to classical weak solutions for the twodimensional incompressible Euler equations with initial data satisfying the conditions that the vorticity is a finite Radon measure of distinguished sign and the kinetic energy is locally bounded. This includes the important example of vortex sheets. The result is valid as long as the computational grid size h does not exceed the smoothing blob size E, i.e., h/~ 5 C. 0 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The development of shocks in nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws may be regularized through either diffusion or relaxation. However, we have observed surprisingly that for some physical problems, when both of the smoothing factors - diffusion and relaxation - coexist, under appropriate asymptotic assumptions, the dispersive waves are enhanced. This phenomenon is studied asymptotically in the sense of the Chapman-Enskog expansion and demonstrated numerically.

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We begin a systematical study on the effect of numerical viscosities. In this paper we investigate the behavior of shock-capturing methods for slowly moving shocks. It is known that for slowly moving shocks even a first-order scheme, such as the Godunov or Roe type methods, will generate downstream oscillatory wave patterns that cannot be effectively damped by the dissipation of these first-order schemes. The purpose of this paper is to understand the formation and behavior of these downstream patterns. Our study shows that the downstream errors are generated by the unsteady nature of the viscous shock profiles and behave diffusively. The scenario is as follows. When solving the compressible Euler equations by shock capturing methods, the smeared density profile introduces a momentum spike at the shock location if the shock moves slowly. Downstream waves will necessarily emerge in order to balance the momentum mass carried by the spike for the momentum conservation. Although each family of waves decays inl∞andl2while they preserve the same mass, the perturbing nature of the viscous or spike profile is a constant source for the generation of new downstream waves, causing spurious solutions foralltime. Higher order TVD or ENO type interpolations accentuate this problem.

In this paper, we review some recent progress made in [4, 5, 6] on finite difference schemes for viscous incompressible flows using vorticity formulation. The main purpose of this series of papers [4, 5, 6] is to resurrect the idea of using local vorticity boundary condition for unsteady calculation. The emphasis is on simplicity of the methods. Three main issues will be discussed: efficient time-stepping procedures and cell Reynolds number constraints, efficient methods in 3D on non-staggered grids and efficient high order methods using compact differencing.