Correspondence between de Saint-Venant and Boussinesq. 1: Birth of the Shallow–Water Equations

The Shallow–Water Equations (SWEs), also referred to as the de Saint-Venant equations, constitute the current governing mathematical tool for free-surface water flows. These include, e.g., flood flows in rivers and in urban zones, flows across hydraulic structures as dams or wastewater facilities, flows in the environmental fields, glaciology, or meteorology. Despite this attractiveness, the system of two partial differential equations has an exact mathematical solution only for a limited number of problems of practical relevance.This historical work on the SWEs is based on a correspondence between two 19th-century scientists, de Saint-Venant and Boussinesq. Their well-known papers are thus commented from the point of development of their theory; the input of both scientists is evidenced by their writings, and comments of both to each other that led to what is commonly known as the SWEs. Given the age difference of the two of 45 years, the experienced engineer de Saint-Venant, and the mathematician Boussinesq, two eminent researchers, met to discuss not only problems in hydraulics, but in physics generally. In addition, their correspondence embraced also questions in ethics, religion, history of sciences, and personal news.The results of the SWEs cease to hold if streamline curvature effects dominate; this includes breaking waves, solitary and cnoidal waves, or non-linear waves in general. In most other cases, however, the SWEs perfectly apply to typical flows in engineering practice; they are considered the fundamental system of equations describing open channel flows. This work thus provides a background to its birth, including lots of comments as to its improvement, physical meanings, methods of solution, and a discussion of the results. This paper also deals with the steady flow equations, gives a short account on the main persons mentioned in the Correspondence, and provides a summary of further developments of the SWEs until 1920.     

Solutions with concentration for conservation laws with discontinuous flux and its applications to numerical schemes for hyperbolic systems

Measure-valued weak solutions for conservation laws with discontinuous flux are proposed and explicit formulae have been derived. We propose convergent discontinuous flux-based numerical schemes for the class of hyperbolic systems that admit nonclassical -shocks, by extending the theory of discontinuous flux for nonlinear conservation laws to scalar transport equation with a discontinuous coefficient. The article also discusses the concentration phenomenon of solutions along the line of discontinuity, for scalar transport equations with a discontinuous coefficient. The existence of the solutions for transport equation is shown using the vanishing viscosity approach and the asymptotic behavior of the solutions is also established. The performance of the numerical schemes for both scalar conservation laws and systems to capture the -shocks effectively is displayed through various numerical experiments.     

Disjoining pressure and the film-height-dependent surface tension of thin liquid films: New insight from capillary wave fluctuations

In this paper we review simulation and experimental studies of thermal capillary wave fluctuations as an ideal means for probing the underlying disjoining pressure and surface tensions, and more generally, fine details of the Interfacial Hamiltonian Model. We discuss recent simulation results that reveal a film-height-dependent surface tension not accounted for in the classical Interfacial Hamiltonian Model. We show how this observation may be explained bottom-up from sound principles of statistical thermodynamics and discuss some of its implications.     

Computational analysis of glycolytic reaction in open spatial reactor

We consider the computational analysis of processes within the spatially-distributed model simulating the glycolytic reaction taking place in the one-side fed open chemical reactor. The main point of the simulation is the decomposition of the reaction–diffusion system into unidirectional reaction in a bulk supplied by feedback terms stated as boundary conditions on the lower boundary of the reactor, i.e. the unique plane where an exchange with an outer medium is possible within the real experimental situation. Analysis of the curvature of the reagents distribution curves proves kinematic character of the observed lateral waves corresponding to the picture of experimentally observed glycolytic traveling waves. At the same time, their origin relates to diffusion of the reagents in a vertical cross-section of the reactor. Study of the solutions for the concerned reaction–diffusion model in the case of stochastically different diffusion coefficients reveals the Turing structures.     

Internal gravity–capillary solitary waves in finite depth

We consider a two‐dimensional inviscid irrotational flow in a two layer fluid under the effects of gravity and interfacial tension. The upper fluid is bounded above by a rigid lid, and the lower fluid is bounded below by a rigid bottom. We use a spatial dynamics approach and formulate the steady Euler equations as a Hamiltonian system, where we consider the unbounded horizontal coordinate x as a time‐like coordinate. The linearization of the Hamiltonian system is studied, and bifurcation curves in the (β,α)‐plane are obtained, where α and β are two parameters. The curves depend on two additional parameters ρ and h, where ρ is the ratio of the densities and h is the ratio of the fluid depths. However, the bifurcation diagram is found to be qualitatively the same as for surface waves. In particular, we find that a Hamiltonian‐Hopf bifurcation, Hamiltonian real 1:1 resonance, and a Hamiltonian 0²‐resonance occur for certain values of (β,α). Of particular interest are solitary wave solutions of the Euler equations. Such solutions correspond to homoclinic solutions of the Hamiltonian system. We investigate the parameter regimes where the Hamiltonian‐Hopf bifurcation and the Hamiltonian real 1:1 resonance occur. In both these cases, we perform a center manifold reduction of the Hamiltonian system and show that homoclinic solutions of the reduced system exist. In contrast to the case of surface waves, we find parameter values ρ and h for which the leading order nonlinear term in the reduced system vanishes. We make a detailed analysis of this phenomenon in the case of the real 1:1 resonance. We also briefly consider the Hamiltonian 0²‐resonance and recover the results found by Kirrmann. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An approximation to the minimum traveling wave for the delayed diffusive Nicholson's blowflies equation

In this work, we study the approximation of traveling wave solutions propagated at minumum speeds c ₀(h ) of the delayed Nicholson's blowflies equation: In order to do that, we construct a subsolution and a super solution to (?). Also, through that construction, an alternative proof of the existence of traveling waves moving at minimum speed is given. Our basic hypothesis is that p /δ ∈(1,e ] and then, the monostability of the reaction term. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.