5 - Introduction to the CLAWPACK Software

Summary

The basic class of finite volume methods developed in this book has been implemented in the software package CLAWPACK. This allows these algorithms to be applied to a wide variety of hyperbolic systems simply by providing the appropriate Riemann solver, along with initial data and boundary conditions. The high-resolution methods introduced in Chapter 6 are implemented, but the simple first-order Godunov method of Chapter 4 is obtained as a special case by setting the input parameters appropriately. (Specifically, set method(2)=1 as described below.) In this chapter an overview of the software is given along with examples of its application to simple problems of advection and acoustics.

The software includes more advanced features that will be introduced later in the book, and can solve linear and nonlinear problems in one, two, and three space dimensions, as well as allowing the specification of capacity functions introduced in Section 2.4 (see Section 6.16) and source terms (see Chapter 17). CLAWPACK is used throughout the book to illustrate the implementation and behavior of various algorithms and their application on different physical systems. Nearly all the computational results presented have been obtained using CLAWPACK with programs that can be downloaded to reproduce these results or investigate the problems further. These samples also provide templates that can be adapted to solve other problems. See Section 1.5 for details on how to access webpages for each example.