Bifurcation mechanism of interfacial electrohydrodynamic gravity-capillary waves near the minimum phase speed under a horizontal electric field

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of interfacial gravity-capillary waves propagating along the interface between two dielectric fluids under the action of a horizontal electric field. There is a uniform background flow in each layer, and the relative motion tends to induce Kelvin–Helmholtz (KH) instability. The combined effects of gravity, surface tension and electrically induced forces are all taken into account. Under the short-wave assumption, the expansion and truncation method of Dirichlet-Neumann (DN) operators is applied to derive a reduced dynamical model. When KH instability is suppressed linearly by a considerably large electric field, our numerical results reveal that in certain regions of parameter space, nonlinear symmetric traveling wave solutions can be found near the minimum phase speed. Additionally, the detailed bifurcation structures are presented together with typical wave profiles.