Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-76mfw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-18T00:35:43.841Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

On the structure of parasitic gravity-capillary standing waves in the small surface tension limit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2023

Josh Shelton*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
Paul Milewski
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK Department of Mathematics, Penn State University, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
Philippe H. Trinh
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
*
Email address for correspondence: j.shelton@bath.ac.uk

Abstract

We present new numerical solutions for nonlinear standing water waves when the effects of both gravity and surface tension are considered. For small values of the surface tension parameter, solutions are shown to exhibit highly oscillatory capillary waves (parasitic ripples), which are both time- and space-periodic, and which lie on the surface of an underlying gravity-driven standing wave. Our numerical scheme combines a time-dependent conformal mapping together with a shooting method, for which the residual is minimised by Newton iteration. Previous numerical investigations typically clustered gridpoints near the wave crest, and thus lacked the fine detail across the domain required to capture this phenomenon of small-scale parasitic ripples. The amplitude of these ripples is shown to be exponentially small in the zero surface tension limit, and their behaviour is linked to (or explains) the generation of an elaborate bifurcation structure.

Information

Type
JFM Rapids
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Two numerical solutions of (2.1) are shown at energy $\mathscr {E}=0.4$. The free boundary, $y=\zeta (x)$, is shown for 11 values of time between $t=0$ and $t=0.25$, at which the maximal amplitude is reached. In (a), we have a gravity standing wave with $B=0$ and $F=0.3931$. In (b), we have a gravity-capillary standing wave with $B=0.003330$ and $F=0.4213$. These solutions were computed with $200$ spatial and $500$ temporal gridpoints, and here B and F are the Bond and Froude numbers defined in (2.2a,b).

Figure 1

Figure 2. The numerical bifurcation diagram of solutions is shown in the $(B,F)$-plane for fixed energy, $\mathscr {E}=0.4$. Solutions (ad) are displayed in figure 3 at $t=1/4$.

Figure 2

Figure 3. The free surface, $y=\eta (x,t)$, is shown for 11 values of time in the interval $t \in [0,1/4]$ for the four solutions labelled in the bifurcation diagram of figure 2. Each profile has energy $\mathscr {E}=0.4$, and (a) $B=0.002830$ and $F=0.4171$, (b) $B=0.003650$ and $F=0.4240$, (c) $B=0.002846$ and $F=0.4158$, (d) $B=0.003206$ and $F=0.4190$.

Figure 3

Figure 4. The time evolution of the free surface at $x=-1/2$, $y=\eta (1/2,t)$ is shown. This value of $x=-1/2$ corresponds to the wave trough in the solutions of figure 3. Note that to discern between each profile, we have vertically shifted the lower two by $-0.02$ and $-0.04$. It is seen that as the Bond number decreases, the temporal wavenumber of the parasitic ripples increases.

Figure 4

Figure 5. The amplitude of the parasitic capillary ripples present in the solution, $y=\eta (x,t)$, is shown at $t=1/4$. Multiple capillary ripple amplitudes are shown, corresponding to solutions across each branch of figure 2 with energy $\mathscr {E}=0.4$. To measure the amplitude of this high-frequency component, lower modes have been filtered out in Fourier space.

Figure 5

Figure 6. (a) Each component of the solution energy (2.5g) is shown throughout the time period. (b) The magnitude of the Fourier coefficients is shown at $t=1/4$, when the standing wave reaches its maximum height. These are shown for the two solutions (a,d) from figure 3, where solid corresponds to solution (a) and hollow to (d).