Front tracking for gas dynamics

Front tracking is an adaptive computational method in which a lower dimensional moving grid is fitted to and follows the dynamical evolution of distinguished waves in a fluid flow. The method takes advantage of known analytic solutions, derived from the Rankine-Hugoniot relations, for idealized discontinuities. In this paper the method is applied to the Euler equations describing compressible gas dynamics. The main thrust here is validation of the front tracking method: we present results on a series of test problems for which comparison answers can be obtained by independent methods.