Abstract
The governing equations in computational fluid dynamics such as the Navier-Stokes- or Euler equations are conservation laws. Finite volume methods are designed to respect this and the theorem of Lax-Wendroff underscores the importance of it. It roughly states that for a nonlinear (!) scalar conservation law in 1D , if the numerical method with explicit Euler time integration is consistent and (locally) conservative, then in case of convergence, the numerical method converges to a weak solution. When using implicit time integration, the widespread believe in the community is that conservation is lost. This is however, not necessarily due to the time integration, but due to the use of iterative solvers. We first present a catalogue of iterative solvers that preserve the weaker property of global conservation to identify candidates of solvers that preserve local conservation as used in the Lax-Wendroff theorem. We then proceed to prove an extension of the Lax-Wendroff theorem for the situation that we perform a fixed number of steps of a so called pseudo time iteration per time step. It turns out that in this case, the numerical method converges to a weak solution of the conservation law with a modified propagation speed. This can be exploited to improve performance of the iterative method.