A REVIEW ON THE MATHEMATICAL ASPECTS OF FLUID FLOW PROBLEMS IN AN INFINITE CHANNEL WITH ARBITRARY BOTTOM TOPOGRAPHY

Abstract

A special system of partial differential equations (PDEs) occur in a natural way while studying a class of irrotational inviscid fluid flow problems involving infinite channels. Certain aspects of solutions of such PDEs are analyzed in the context of flow problems involving multiple layers of fluids of different constant densities in a channel associated with arbitrary bottom topography. The whole analysis is divided into two parts-part A and part B. In part A the linearized theory is employed along with the standard Fourier analysis to understand such flow problems and physical quantities of interest are derived analytically. In part B, the same set of problems handled in part A are examined in the light of a weakly non-linear theory involving perturbation in terms of a small parameter and it is shown that the original problems can be cast into KdV type of nonlinear PDEs involving the bottom topography occurring in one of the coefficients of these equations. Special cases of bottom topography are worked out in detail and expressions for quantities of physical importance are derived.