A FINITE ELEMENT METHOD FOR THE SHALLOW WATER EQUATIONS

The paper reports the current progress in developing a finite element method for the shallow water equations. The main feature of the method is the special care given to the advective and diffusive parts of the equations, so that it can be of interest to use it when dealing with flows strongly influenced by convective and boundary layer effects. The solution procedure has been chosen so as to allow a calculation with a big number of nodes. Section 3 of the paper outlines the method. In section 4, is detailed the procedure for the advective terms, involving the determination of the characteristic curves. Section 5 is devoted to the diffusion and propagation terms. Finally numerical results are presented in section 6.