Intermittent Sub-grid Wave Correction from Differentiated Riemann Variables
Abstract
We introduce a low-cost every--step correction for one-dimensional Euler computations. The correction uses differentiated Riemann variables (DRVs) -- characteristic derivatives that isolate the left acoustic wave, the contact, and the right acoustic wave -- to locate the current wave packet, sample the surrounding constant states, perform a short Newton update for the intermediate pressure and contact speed, and conservatively remap a sharpened profile back onto the grid. The ingredients are elementary -- filtered centered differences, local state sampling, a single Newton step, and conservative cell averaging -- yet the effect on accuracy is disproportionate. On a long-time severe-expansion benchmark (, ), intermittent correction drives the intermediate-state errors from to , i.e. to machine precision. On a long-time LeBlanc benchmark (, ), the method crosses a qualitative threshold: one-shot final-time reconstruction fails entirely (shock location error ), whereas correction every three steps recovers an almost exact sharp solution with contact and shock positions accurate to machine precision. The same detector-and-Newton mechanism handles two-shock and two-rarefaction packets without case-specific logic, with plateau improvements of four to sixteen orders of magnitude. In an unoptimized Python prototype the wall-clock overhead is below a factor of two even on the most aggressively corrected benchmark. To our knowledge, no comparably lightweight fixed-grid add-on has been shown to recover this level of coarse-grid accuracy on the long-time LeBlanc and related near-vacuum problems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.22084,
title = {Intermittent Sub-grid Wave Correction from Differentiated Riemann Variables},
author = {Steve Shkoller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.22084},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
16 pages, 6 figures