DRIVING FORCE AND KINETIC RELATIONS FOR SCALAR CONSERVATION LAWS

This paper is concerned with the circumstances under which the dissipative character of a one-dimensional scalar conservation law may be described by a formalism strictly analogous to that arising naturally in the dynamics of nonlinearly elastic materials. It is shown that this occurs if and only if the entropy density, entropy flux pair associated with the conservation law takes a particular form. We compare the admissibility condition associated with this special entropy with other admissibility criteria such as those of Lax, Oleinik and regularization theory. Using the special entropy, we consider the Riemann problem for an example in which genuine nonlinearity fails and a kinetic relation is needed to determine a unique solution.