The third-order perturbed Korteweg-de Vries equation for shallow water waves with a non-flat bottom

Abstract

The goal of this work is to investigate, analytically and numerically, the dynamics of gravity water waves with the effects of the small surface tension and the bottom topography taken into account. Using a third-order perturbative approach of the Boussinesq equation, we obtain a new third-order perturbed Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation which includes nonlinear, dispersive, nonlocal and mixed nonlinear-dispersive terms, describing shallow water waves with a non-flat bottom and the surface tension. We show by numerical simulations, for various bottom shapes, that this new third-order perturbed KdV equation can support the propagation of solitary waves, whose profiles strongly depend on the surface tension. In particular, we show that the instability observed in the numerical simulation can be suppressed by the inclusion of small surface tension.