Stability of oscillatory gravity wave trains with energy dissipation and Benjamin-Feir instability

Abstract

The Benjamin-Feir instability describes the instability of a uniform oscillatory wave train in an irrotational flow subject to small perturbation of wave number, amplitude and frequency. Their instability analysis is based on the perturbation around the second order Stokes wave which satisfies the dynamic and kinematic free-surface boundary conditions up to the second order. In the same irrotational flow and perturbation framework of the Benjamin-Feir analysis, the perturbation in the present paper is around a nonlinear oscillatory wave train which solves exactly the dynamic free-surface boundary condition and satisfies the kinematic free-surface boundary condition up to the third order. It is shown that the nonlinear oscillatory wave train is stable with respect to the perturbation when the irrotational flow involves small Rayleigh energy dissipation.