Modulational instability in the Whitham equation with surface tension and vorticity

DOI10.1016/J.NA.2015.08.019zbMATH Open1330.35329arXiv1506.07560OpenAlexW2962822343MaRDI QIDQ893301FDOQ893301

Mathew A. Johnson, Vera Mikyoung Hur

Publication date: 13 November 2015

Published in: Nonlinear Analysis. Theory, Methods \& Applications. Series A: Theory and Methods (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We study modulational stability and instability in the Whitham equation, combining the dispersion relation of water waves and a nonlinearity of the shallow water equations, and modified to permit the effects of surface tension and constant vorticity. When the surface tension coefficient is large, we show that a periodic traveling wave of sufficiently small amplitude is unstable to long wavelength perturbations if the wave number is greater than a critical value, and stable otherwise, similarly to the Benjamin-Feir instability of gravity waves. In the case of weak surface tension, we find intervals of stable and unstable wave numbers, whose boundaries are associated with the extremum of the group velocity, the resonance between the first and second harmonics, the resonance between long and short waves, and a resonance between dispersion and the nonlinearity. For each constant vorticity we show that a periodic traveling wave of sufficiently small amplitude is unstable if the wave number is greater than a critical value, and stable otherwise. Moreover it can be made stable for a sufficiently large vorticity. The results agree with those based upon numerical computations or formal multiple-scale expansions for the physical problem.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.07560

zbMATH Keywords

constant vorticitysurface tensionwater wavesmodulational instabilityWhitham equation

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Stability in context of PDEs (35B35) PDEs in connection with fluid mechanics (35Q35) Traveling wave solutions (35C07) KdV equations (Korteweg-de Vries equations) (35Q53) Capillarity (surface tension) for incompressible inviscid fluids (76B45) Water waves, gravity waves; dispersion and scattering, nonlinear interaction (76B15) Stability and instability of geophysical and astrophysical flows (76E20)

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Cited In (23)

• The cubic vortical Whitham equation
• The effects of surface tension on modulational instability in full-dispersion water-wave models
• Two-dimensional stability of finite-amplitude gravity waves on water of finite depth with constant vorticity
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• On the local well-posedness for a full-dispersion Boussinesq system with surface tension
• Fully dispersive models for moving loads on ice sheets

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