It is proven that small-amplitude steady periodic water waves with infinite depth are unstable with respect to long-wave perturbations. This modulational instability was first observed more than half a century ago by Benjamin and Feir. It has been proven rigorously only in the case of finite depth. We provide a completely different and self-contained approach to prove the spectral modulational instability for water waves in both the finite and infinite depth cases.
The well-known Stokes waves refer to periodic traveling waves under the gravity at the free surface of a two dimensional full water wave system. In this paper, we prove that small-amplitude Stokes waves with infinite depth are nonlinearly unstable under long-wave perturbations. Our approach is based on the modulational approximation of the water wave system and the instability mechanism of the focusing cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation.
We study the modulational instability of a shallow water model, with and without surface tension, which generalizes the Whitham equation to include bi-directional propagation. Without surface tension, the small amplitude periodic traveling waves are modulationally unstable if their wave number is greater than a critical wave number predicting a Benjamin-Feir type instability and the result qualitatively agrees with the shallow water model in [HP16]. With surface tension, the result qualitatively agrees with the physical problem except for the large surface tension limit which is accurately pre…
We show that periodic traveling waves with sufficiently small amplitudes of the Whitham equation, which incorporates the dispersion relation of surface water waves and the nonlinearity of the shallow water equations,are spectrally unstable to long wavelengths perturbations if the wave number is greater than a critical value, bearing out the Benjamin-Feir instability of Stokes waves; they are spectrally stable to square integrable perturbations otherwise. The proof involves a spectral perturbation of the associated linearized operator with respect to the Floquet exponent and the small amplitude…
We propose a shallow water model which combines the dispersion relation of water waves and the Boussinesq equations, and which extends the Whitham equation to permit bidirectional propagation. We establish that its sufficiently small, periodic wave train is spectrally unstable to long wavelength perturbations, provided that the wave number is greater than a critical value, like the Benjamin-Feir instability of a Stokes wave. We verify that the asso- ciated linear operator possesses infinitely many collisions of purely imaginary eigenvalues, but they do not contribute to instability away from t…
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 inter…
We determine the stability and instability of a sufficiently small and periodic traveling wave to long wavelength perturbations, for a nonlinear dispersive equation which extends a Camassa-Holm equation to include all the dispersion of water waves and the Whitham equation to include nonlinearities of medium amplitude waves. In the absence of the effects of surface tension, the result qualitatively agrees with the Benjamin-Feir instability of a Stokes wave. In the presence of the effects of surface tension, it qualitatively agrees with those from formal asymptotic expansions of the physical pro…
In this paper we investigate the qualitative behaviour of the pressure function beneath an extreme Stokes wave over infinite depth. The presence of a stagnation point at the wave-crest of an extreme Stokes wave introduces a number of mathematical difficulties resulting in the irregularity of the free surface profile. It will be proven that the pressure decreases in the horizontal direction between a crest-line and subsequent trough-line, except along these lines themselves where the pressure is stationary with respect to the horizontal coordinate. In addition we will prove that the pressure st…
We generalize the periodic Evans function approach recently used to study the spectral stability of Stokes wave and gravity-capillary (including Wilton ripples) in water of finite depth to study spectral stability of Stokes waves in water of infinite depth. We prove waves of sufficiently small amplitude are always low-frequency unstable regardless of the wave number and gravity, giving an alternative proof for the Benjamin-Feir modulational instability in the infinite depth case. Here, the first proof for the infinite depth case is recently obtained by Nguyen and Strauss. We also study the spe…
This article concerns the water wave problem in a three-dimensional domain of infinite depth and examines the modulational regime for weakly nonlinear wavetrains. We use the method of normal form transformations near the equilibrium state to provide a new derivation of the Hamiltonian Dysthe equation describing the slow evolution of the wave envelope. A precise calculation of the third-order normal form allows for a refined reconstruction of the free surface. We test our approximation against direct numerical simulations of the three-dimensional Euler system and against predictions from the cl…
In this note, we report on recent findings concerning the spectral and nonlinear stability of periodic traveling wave solutions of hyperbolic-parabolic systems of balance laws, as applied to the St. Venant equations of shallow water flow down an incline. We begin by introducing a natural set of spectral stability assumptions, motivated by considerations from the Whitham averaged equations, and outline the recent proof yielding nonlinear stability under these conditions. We then turn to an analytical and numerical investigation of the verification of these spectral stability assumptions. While …
We consider small amplitude wave packet-like solutions to the 3D inviscid incompressible irrotational infinite depth water wave problem neglecting surface tension. Formal multiscale calculations suggest that the modulation of such a solution is described by a profile traveling at group velocity and governed by a hyperbolic cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation. In this paper we show that, given wave packet initial data, the corresponding solution exists and retains the form of a wave packet on natural NLS time scales. Moreover, we give rigorous error estimates between the true and formal soluti…
Small-amplitude, traveling, space periodic solutions -- called Stokes waves -- of the 2 dimensional gravity water waves equations in deep water are linearly unstable with respect to long-wave perturbations, as predicted by Benjamin and Feir in 1967. We completely describe the behavior of the four eigenvalues close to zero of the linearized equations at the Stokes wave, as the Floquet exponent is turned on. We prove in particular the conjecture that a pair of non-purely imaginary eigenvalues depicts a closed figure eight, parameterized by the Floquet exponent, in full agreement with numerical s…
We prove an analyticity result for the Dirichlet-Neumann operator under space periodic boundary conditions in any dimension in an unbounded domain with infinite depth. We derive an analytic bifurcation result of analytic Stokes waves -- i.e. space periodic traveling solutions -- of the water waves equations in deep water.
In this note, we show the existence of regular solutions to the stationary version of the Navier-Stokes system for compressible fluids with a density dependent viscosity, known as the shallow water equations. For arbitrary large forcing we are able to construct a solution, provided the total mass is sufficiently large. The main mathematical part is located in the construction of solutions. Uniqueness is impossible to obtain, since the gradient of the velocity is of magnitude of the force. The investigation is connected to the corresponding singular limit as Mach number goes to zero and methods…
We modify the nonlinear shallow water equations, the Korteweg-de Vries equation, and the Whitham equation, to permit constant vorticity, and examine wave breaking, or the lack thereof. By wave breaking, we mean that the solution remains bounded but its slope becomes unbounded in finite time. We show that a solution of the vorticity-modified shallow water equations breaks if it carries an increase of elevation; the breaking time decreases to zero as the size of vorticity increases. We propose a full-dispersion shallow water model, which combines the dispersion relation of water waves and the no…
We consider the two-dimensional problem for steady water waves with vorticity on water of finite depth. While neglecting the effects of surface tension we construct connected families of large amplitude periodic waves approaching the limiting wave, which is either a solitary wave, the highest solitary wave, the highest Stokes wave or a Stokes wave with a breaking profile. In particular, when the vorticity is nonnegative we prove the existence of highest Stokes waves with an included angle of 120 degrees. In contrast to previous studies we fix the Bernoulli constant and consider the wavelength …
The purpose of this paper is to derive rigorously the so called viscous shallow water equations given for instance page 958-959 in [A. Oron, S.H. Davis, S.G. Bankoff, Rev. Mod. Phys, 69 (1997), 931?980]. Such a system of equations is similar to compressible Navier-Stokes equations for a barotropic fluid with a non-constant viscosity. To do that, we consider a layer of incompressible and Newtonian fluid which is relatively thin, assuming no surface tension at the free surface. The motion of the fluid is described by 3d Navier-Stokes equations with constant viscosity and free surface. We prove t…
On global classical and weak solutions with arbitrary large initial data to the multi-dimensional viscous Saint-Venant system and compressible Navier-Stokes equations subject to the BD entropy condition under spherical symmetry
In this article, we consider the compressible Navier-Stokes equation with density dependent viscosity coefficients and a term of capillarity introduced by Coquel et al in \cite{5CR}. This model includes at the same time the barotropic Navier-Stokes equations with variable viscosity coefficients, shallow-water system and the model of Rohde. We first study the well-posedness of the model in critical regularity spaces with respect to the scaling of the associated equations. In a functional setting as close as possibleto the physical energy spaces, we prove global existence of solutions close to a…
This paper is a study of the water wave problem in a two-dimensional domain of infinite depth in the presence of nonzero constant vorticity. A goal is to describe the effects of uniform shear flow on the modulation of weakly nonlinear quasi-monochromatic surface gravity waves. Starting from the Hamiltonian formulation of this problem and using techniques from Hamiltonian transformation theory, we derive a Hamiltonian Dysthe equation for the time evolution of the wave envelope. Consistent with previous studies, we observe that the uniform shear flow tends to enhance or weaken the modulational i…
Global spherically symmetric classical solutions for arbitrary large initial data of the multi-dimensional non-isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations
In this article, we derive a viscous Boussinesq system for surface water waves from Navier-Stokes equations. We use neither the irrotationality assumption, nor the Zakharov-Craig-Sulem formulation. During the derivation, we find the bottom shear stress, and also the decay rate for shallow water. In order to justify our derivation, we derive the viscous Korteweg-de Vries equation from our viscous Boussinesq system and compare it to the ones found in the bibliography. We also extend the system to the 3-D case.
We propose higher-order approximation formulae recovering the surface elevation from the pressure at the bed and the background shear flow for small-amplitude Stokes and solitary water waves. They offer improvements over the pressure transfer function and the hydrostatic approximation. The formulae compare reasonably well with asymptotic approximations of the exact relation between the pressure at the bed and the surface wave in the zero vorticity case, but they incorporate the effects of vorticity through solutions of the Rayleigh equation. Several examples are discussed.
In this article, we mainly investigate the properties of vertical velocity v for two dimensional steady water waves over a flat bed. Firstly we prove the existence of the inflection point for each streamline, then we find the behavior of v along each streamline depends strictly on concavity and convexity of streamline, which contributes to complete Constantin conjecture on v in Stokes wave. And the location of maximum vertical fluid velocity is also proven to be at the inflection point. Besides, we also extend our results to the cases with monotonous vorticity.
Stokes waves are steady periodic water waves on the free surface of an infinitely deep irrotational two dimensional flow under gravity without surface tension. They can be described in terms of solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equation of a certain functional. This allows one to define the Morse index of a Stokes wave. It is well known that if the Morse indices of the elements of a set of non-singular Stokes waves are bounded, then none of them is close to a singular one. The paper presents a quantitative variant of this result.
The existence of periodic waves propagating downstream on the surface of a two-dimensional infinitely deep water under gravity is established for a general class of vorticities. When reformulated as an elliptic boundary value problem in a fixed semi-infinite strip with a parameter, the operator describing the problem is nonlinear and non-Fredholm. A global connected set of nontrivial solutions is obtained via singular theory of bifurcation. Each solution on the continuum has a symmetric and monotone wave profile. The proof uses a generalized degree theory, global bifurcation theory and Wyburn'…
Steady linear gravity waves of small amplitude travelling on a current of constant vorticity are found. For negative vorticity we show the appearance of internal waves and vortices, wherein the particle trajectories are not any more closed ellipses. For positive vorticity the situation resembles that of Stokes waves, but for large vorticity the trajectories are affected.
This paper is dedicated to the study of both viscous compressible barotropic fluids and Navier-Stokes equation with dependent density, when the viscosity coefficients are variable, in dimension $d\geq2$. We aim at proving the local and global well-posedness for respectively {\it large} and \textit{small} initial data having critical Besov regularity and more precisely we are interested in extending the class of initial data velocity when we consider the shallow water system, improving the results in \cite{CMZ1,H2} and \cite{arma}. Our result relies on the fact that the velocity $u$ can be writ…
We prove the global existence and uniqueness of smooth solutions to the one-dimensional barotropic Navier-Stokes system with degenerate viscosity $μ(ρ)=ρ^α$. We establish that the smooth solutions have possibly two different far-fields, and the initial density remains positive globally in time, for the initial data satisfying the same conditions. In addition, our result works for any $α>0$, i.e., for a large class of degenerate viscosities. In particular, our models include the viscous shallow water equations. This extends the result of Constantin-Drivas-Nguyen-Pasqualotto \cite[Theorem 1.5]{C…
In this paper, the $2$-D isentropic Navier-Stokes systems for compressible fluids with density-dependent viscosity coefficients are considered. In particular, we assume that the viscosity coefficients are proportional to density. These equations, including several models in $2$-D shallow water theory, are degenerate when vacuum appears. We introduce the notion of regular solutions and prove the local existence of solutions in this class allowing the initial vacuum in the far field. This solution is further shown to be stable with respect to initial data in $H^2$ sense. A Beal-Kato-Majda type b…
This is a study of singular solutions of the problem of traveling gravity water waves on flows with vorticity. We show that, for a certain class of vorticity functions, a sequence of regular waves converges to an extreme wave with stagnation points at its crests. We also show that, for any vorticity function, the profile of an extreme wave must have either a corner of $120^\circ$ or a horizontal tangent at any stagnation point about which it is supposed symmetric. Moreover, the profile necessarily has a corner of $120^\circ$ if the vorticity is nonnegative near the free surface.
Whitham and Benjamin predicted in 1967 that small-amplitude periodic traveling Stokes waves of the 2d-gravity water waves equations are linearly unstable with respect to long-wave perturbations, if the depth $\mathtt h$ is larger than a critical threshold $\mathtt h_{WB} \approx 1.363$. In this paper we completely describe, for any value of $\mathtt h > 0$, the four eigenvalues close to zero of the linearized equations at the Stokes wave, as the Floquet exponent $μ$ is turned on. We prove in particular the existence of a unique depth $\mathtt h_{WB}$, which coincides with the one predicted by …
