Steady flows of inviscid fluids under localized perturbations (Q1120388)

It is a classical problem to describe the steady flow of an inviscid nondiffusive fluid through a channel of varying depth. In the hydrodynamic literature only special cases have been treated, namely, those which lead to a linear equation for the basically nonlinear problem (e.g., constant density and constant inflow velocity). To find all flows of sufficiently small amplitude we treat the stationary problem formally as an evolution equation in the unbounded space variable. This approach has been successfully used to construct steady solitary waves in plane, undisturbed channels for Froude numbers \(F=c/\sqrt{gh}\) larger than a critical value \(F_ 0\). Here c is the inflow velocity, h the depth of the channel, and g the gravity. Our aim is to obtain all steady flows in a channel with a small obstacle for Froude numbers near the critical value \(F_ 0\). From the mathematical point of view our analysis extends the above-mentioned work to the ``nonautonomous'' case, i.e., to the case where the isotropy in the unbounded variable is broken by external forces or by an obstacle.