On shock capturing in smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract: For the past 20 years, our approach to shock capturing in smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) has been to use artificial viscosity and conductivity terms supplemented by switches to control excess dissipation away from shocks (Monaghan 1997; Morris & Monaghan 1997). This approach has been demonstrated to be superior to approximate Riemann solvers in a recent comparison (Puri & Ramachandran 2014). The Cullen & Dehnen (2010) switch is regarded as the state of the art. But are we missing something? I will present a novel approach to shock capturing in SPH that utilises the philosophy of approximate Riemann solvers but provides a direct improvement on the ability to reduce excess dissipation away from shocks while preserving the fidelity of the shock itself.