Dressed solitary waves in an elastic tube (Q1808307)

The authors study a one-dimensional problem describing an incompressible fluid confined within an infinitely long circular tube consisting of viscoelastic material and locally perturbed by a pulse wave of pressure. In the lowest order, by considering long wavelengths, such system leads to a solitary wave solution governed by a KdV equation. With the aid of a direct approach, starting with traveling wave solutions and making use of the tanh method, the authors show that the involved mathematics may be drastically reduced, and that expressions for the relevant quantities may be derived up to any order. Moreover, the speed of these waves is predetermined exactly. The authors derive analytic expressions for the dressed solitary waves up to third order, and investigate the influence of different parameters. Some comparisons are made with experimental data, which validates the necessity of the expansion procedure.