Evolving solitons in bubbly flows (Q1896414)

It is known that one of the applications of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation is propagation of waves in a liquid saturated with air bubbles. In the present work, a review of derivation of the KdV equation in this context is given, together with experimental results that are in good agreement with the theory. Then, a new problem is considered: calculation, in the framework of the inverse scattering transform for the KdV equation, of the soliton content of an initial triangular pulse. In the underlying physical problem, this initial pulse corresponds to a shock wave followed by a rarefication wave. It is shown that the scattering problem for the triangular pulse can be solved exactly in terms of the standard Airy functions. Counting the number of zeros of this solution allows to find the number of solitons generated by the pulse.