Travelling waves over an arbitrary bathymetry: a perturbation theory approach

TL;DR

This paper develops a perturbation theory approach to analyze travelling waves over arbitrary bathymetry in shallow water, modeling the flow as a nearly-integrable non-autonomous Hamiltonian system.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbation theory framework for shallow-water waves over arbitrary bathymetry, connecting fluid dynamics with aperiodic Hamiltonian systems.

Findings

Hamiltonian formulation of wave-bathymetry interaction

Stability analysis of the wave system

Application of perturbation theory to non-autonomous systems

Abstract

The problem of a travelling wave over an arbitrary quasi-flat bathymetry in a semi infinite channel is studied in the shallow-water formulation. It is shown how the streamfunction can be cast, in the vicinity of an elliptic equilibrium for the fluid flow, in the form of a nearly-integrable non-autonomous Hamiltonian with aperiodic time dependence. The proofs use the tools of perturbation theory in the real-analytic setting. The obtained Hamiltonian provides a natural example in the context of the aperiodically time-dependent Hamiltonian systems studied in Fortunati and Wiggins (2016). Some key properties of the system at hand, such as the stability, can be addressed as a consequence of this theory.