Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will first give a brief review on simple and robust central-upwind schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws. I will then discuss their application to the Saint-Venant system of shallow water equations. This can be done in a straightforward manner, but then the resulting scheme may suffer from the lack of balance between the fluxes and (possibly singular) geometric source term, which may lead to a so-called numerical storm, and from appearance of negative values of the water height, which may destroy the entire computed solution. To circumvent these difficulties, we have developed a special technique, which guarantees that the designed second-order central-upwind scheme is both well-balanced and positivity preserving. Finally, I will show how the scheme can be extended to the two-layer shallow water equations and to the Savage-Hutter type model of submarine landslides and generated tsunami waves, which, in addition to the geometric source term, contain nonconservative interlayer exchange terms. It is well-known that such terms, which arise in many different multiphase models, are extremely sensitive to a particular choice their numerical discretization. To circumvent this difficulty, we rewrite the studied systems in a different way so that the nonconservative terms are multiplied by a quantity, which is, in all practically meaningful cases, very small. We then apply the central-upwind scheme to the rewritten system and demonstrate robustness and superb performance of the proposed method on a number numerical examples.