Internal waves describe the (linear) response of an incompressible stably stratified fluid to small perturbations. The inclination of their group velocity with respect to the vertical is completely determined by their frequency. Therefore the reflection on a sloping boundary cannot follow Descartes' laws, and it is expected to be singular if the slope has the same inclination as the group velocity. In this paper, we prove that in this critical geometry the weakly viscous and weakly nonlinear wave equations have actually a solution which is well approximated by the sum of the incident wave packet, a reflected second harmonic and some boundary layer terms. This result confirms the prediction by Dauxois and Young, and provides precise estimates on the time of validity of this approximation.
We present a rigorous convergence result for the smooth solutions to a singular semilinear hyperbolic approximation, a vector BGK model, to the solutions to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in Sobolev spaces. Our proof is based on the use of a constant right symmetrizer, weighted with respect to the parameter of the singular pertubation system. This symmetrizer provides a conservative-dissipative form for the system and this allow us to perform uniform energy estimates and to get the convergence by compactness.
We investigate the long-time properties of the two-dimensional inviscid Boussinesq equations near a stably stratified Couette flow, for an initial Gevrey perturbation of size ε. Under the classical Miles-Howard stability condition on the Richardson number, we prove that the system experiences a shear-buoyancy instability: the density variation and velocity undergo an O(t −1/2 ) inviscid damping while the vorticity and density gradient grow as O(t 1/2 ). The result holds at least until the natural, nonlinear timescale t ≈ ε −2 . Notice that the density behaves very differently from a passive scalar, as can be seen from the inviscid damping and slower gradient growth. The proof relies on several ingredients: (A) a suitable symmetrization that makes the linear terms amenable to energy methods and takes into account the classical Miles-Howard spectral stability condition; (B) a variation of the Fourier time-dependent energy method introduced for the inviscid, homogeneous Couette flow problem developed on a toy model adapted to the Boussinesq equations, i.e. tracking the potential nonlinear echo chains in the symmetrized variables despite the vorticity growth.
We investigate the linear stability of shears near the Couette flow for a class of 2D incompressible stably stratified fluids. Our main result consists of nearly optimal decay rates for perturbations of stationary states whose velocities are monotone shear flows (U (y), 0) and have an exponential density profile. In the case of the Couette flow U (y) = y, we recover the rates predicted by Hartman in 1975, by adopting an explicit point-wise approach in frequency space. As a by-product, this implies optimal decay rates as well as Lyapunov instability in L 2 for the vorticity. For the previously unexplored case of more general shear flows close to Couette, the inviscid damping results follow by a weighted energy estimate. Each outcome concerning the stably stratified regime applies to the Boussinesq equations as well. Remarkably, our results hold under the celebrated Miles-Howard criterion for stratified fluids. CONTENTS 1. Introduction 1 2. Preliminaries 6 3. The Couette flow 10 4. Shears close to Couette 13 References 27 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 35Q35, 76F10.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.