A Second-Order Well-Balanced Finite Volume Scheme for the Multilayer Shallow Water Model with Variable Density

Abstract

In this work, we consider a multilayer shallow water model with variable density. It consists of a system of hyperbolic equations with non-conservative products that takes into account the pressure variations due to density fluctuations in a stratified fluid. A second-order finite volume method that combines a hydrostatic reconstruction technique with a MUSCL second order reconstruction operator is developed. The scheme is well-balanced for the lake-at-rest steady state solutions. Additionally, hints on how to preserve a general class of stationary solutions corresponding to a stratified density profile are also provided. Some numerical results are presented, including validation with laboratory data that show the efficiency and accuracy of the approach introduced here. Finally, a comparison between two different parallelization strategies on GPU is presented.