The Riemann problem for a hyperbolic model of two-phase flow in conservative form

This article is to continue the present author's work (International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics (2009) 23 (9), 623–641) on studying the structure of solutions of the Riemann problem for a system of three conservation laws governing two-phase flows. While existing solutions are limited and found quite recently for the Baer and Nunziato equations, this article presents the first instance of an exact solution of the Riemann problem for two-phase flow in gas–liquid mixture. To demonstrate the structure of the solution, we use a hyperbolic conservative model with mechanical equilibrium and without velocity equilibrium. The Riemann problem solution for the model equations comprises a set of elementary waves, rarefaction and discontinuous waves of various types. In particular, such a solution treats both the wave structure and the intermediate states of the two-phase gas–liquid mixture. The resulting exact Riemann solver is fully non-linear, direct and complete. On this basis then, we use locally the exact Riemann solver for the two-phase flow in gas–liquid mixture within the framework of finite volume upwind Godunov methods. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed solver, we consider a series of test problems selected from the open literature and compare the exact and numerical results by using upwind Godunov methods, showing excellent oscillation-free results in two-phase fluid flow problems.