On the structure of BV entropy solutions for hyperbolic systems of balance laws with general flux function

Abstract

The paper describes the qualitative structure of BV entropy solutions of a general strictly hyperbolic system of balance laws with characteristic field either piecewise genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate. In particular, we provide an accurate description of the local and global wave-front structure of a BV solution generated by a fractional step scheme combined with a wave-front tracking algorithm. This extends the corresponding results in [S. Bianchini and L. Yu, Global structure of admissible BV solutions to piecewise genuinely nonlinear, strictly hyperbolic conservation laws in one space dimension, Comm. Partial Differential Equations 39(2) (2014) 244–273] for strictly hyperbolic system of conservation laws.