The moving contact line problem for the $2D$ nonlinear shallow water equations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the free boundary problem for 2D nonlinear shallow water equations with a fixed immersed solid, deriving energy estimates and revealing hidden boundary regularity crucial for understanding wave-structure interactions.

Contribution

It introduces new energy estimates and boundary regularity results for the nonlinear shallow water equations with a moving contact line, advancing the mathematical understanding of wave-structure interactions.

Findings

Established a priori energy estimates for solutions.

Discovered a new hidden boundary regularity property.

Controlled the contact line regularity using characteristic fields.

Abstract

We consider the initial value problem for a nonlinear shallow water model in horizontal dimension d = 2 and in the presence of a fixed partially immersed solid body on the water surface. We assume that the bottom of the solid body is the graph of a smooth function and part of it is in contact with the water. As a result, we have a contact line where the solid body, the water, and the air meet. In our setting of the problem, the projection of the contact line on the horizontal plane moves freely due to the motion of the water surface even if the solid body is fixed. This wave-structure interaction problem reduces to an initial boundary value problem for the nonlinear shallow water equations in an exterior domain with a free boundary, which is the projection of the contact line. The objective of this paper is to derive a priori energy estimates locally in time for solutions at the quasilinear regularity threshold under assumptions that the initial flow is irrotational and subcritical and that the initial water surface is transversal to the bottom of the solid body at the contact line. The key ingredients of the proof are the weak dissipativity of the system, the introduction of second order Alinhac good unknowns associated with a regularizing diffeomorphism, and a new type of hidden boundary regularity for the nonlinear shallow water equations. This last point is crucial to control the regularity of the contact line; it is obtained by combining the use of the characteristic fields related to the eigenvalues of the boundary matrix together with Rellich type identities.