A mathematical analysis of the Kakinuma model for interfacial gravity waves. Part II: Justification as a shallow water approximation

TL;DR

This paper rigorously justifies the Kakinuma model as a higher order shallow water approximation for interfacial gravity waves, providing error estimates and demonstrating its accuracy compared to the full model.

Contribution

It establishes the Kakinuma model as a valid higher order shallow water approximation with quantifiable error bounds.

Findings

Kakinuma model approximates full interfacial gravity wave model with order $O( ext{shallowness})^{4N+2}$ error.

Under solution existence assumptions, the model's solutions closely match the full model with error estimates.

Error bounds are also provided for the Hamiltonian between the models.

Abstract

We consider the Kakinuma model for the motion of interfacial gravity waves. The Kakinuma model is a system of Euler-Lagrange equations for an approximate Lagrangian, which is obtained by approximating the velocity potentials in the Lagrangian of the full model. Structures of the Kakinuma model and the well-posedness of its initial value problem were analyzed in the companion paper [arXiv:2103.12392]. In this present paper, we show that the Kakinuma model is a higher order shallow water approximation to the full model for interfacial gravity waves with an error of order $O(\delta_1^{4N+2}+\delta_2^{4N+2})$ in the sense of consistency, where $\delta_1$ and $\delta_2$ are shallowness parameters, which are the ratios of the mean depths of the upper and the lower layers to the typical horizontal wavelength, respectively, and $N$ is, roughly speaking, the size of the Kakinuma model and can be taken an arbitrarily large number. Moreover, under a hypothesis of the existence of the solution to the full model with a uniform bound, a rigorous justification of the Kakinuma model is proved by giving an error estimate between the solution to the Kakinuma model and that of the full model. An error estimate between the Hamiltonian of the Kakinuma model and that of the full model is also provided.