  This paper is devoted to the treatment of specific numerical problems which
appear when phase appearance or disappearance occurs in models of two-phase
flows. Such models have crucial importance in many industrial areas such as
nuclear power plant safety studies. In this paper, two outstanding problems are
identified: first, the loss of hyperbolicity of the system when a phase appears
or disappears and second, the lack of positivity of standard shock capturing
schemes such as the Roe scheme. After an asymptotic study of the model, this
paper proposes accurate and robust numerical methods adapted to the simulation
of phase appearance or disappearance. Polynomial solvers are developed to avoid
the use of eigenvectors which are needed in usual shock capturing schemes, and
a method based on an adaptive numerical diffusion is designed to treat the
positivity problems. An alternate method, based on the use of the hyperbolic
tangent function instead of a polynomial, is also considered. Numerical results
are presented which demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solutions.
