Conservation laws in discrete geometry

The small length scales of the dissipative processes of physical viscosity and heat conduction are typically not resolved in the numerical simulation of high Reynolds number flows in the discrete geometry of computational grids. Historically, the simulations of flows with shocks and/or turbulence have relied on solving the Euler equations with dissipative regularization. In this paper, we begin by reviewing the regularization strategies used in shock wave calculations in both a Lagrangian and an Eulerian framework. We exhibit the essential similarities with Large Eddy Simulation models of turbulence, namely that almost all of these depend on the square of the size of the computational cell. In our principal result, we justify that dependence by deriving the evolution equations for a finite-sized volume of fluid. Those evolution equations, termed finite scale Navier-Stokes (FSNS), contain dissipative terms similar to the artificial viscosity first proposed by von Neumann and Richtmyer. We describe the properties of FSNS, provide a physical interpretation of the dissipative terms and show the connection to recent concepts in fluid dynamics, including inviscid dissipation and bi-velocity hydrodynamics.