Flux-stability for conservation laws with discontinuous flux and convergence rates of the front tracking method

Abstract

Abstract We prove that adapted entropy solutions of scalar conservation laws with discontinuous flux are stable with respect to changes in the flux under the assumption that the flux is strictly monotone in $u$ and the spatial dependency is piecewise constant with finitely many discontinuities. We use this stability result to prove a convergence rate for the front tracking method—a numerical method that is widely used in the field of conservation laws with discontinuous flux. To the best of our knowledge, both of these results are the first of their kind in the literature on conservation laws with discontinuous flux. We also present numerical experiments verifying the convergence rate results and comparing numerical solutions computed with the front tracking method to finite volume approximations.