Flow patterns induced by a moving disturbance in rotational flows within the forced Korteweg-de Vries equation

Abstract

Flow structures beneath a moving disturbance along a water free surface in the weakly nonlinear weakly dispersive regime in a sheared channel with finite depth and constant vorticity are investigated. We compute the exact two branches of steady solutions in the disturbance moving frame. The velocity field in the bulk fluid is approximated which allows us to compute the flow structures beneath the free surface including stagnation points and Kelvin cat-eyes structures. We show that stagnation points exist only in one branch of solutions. The bifurcation of the flow is analyzed according to the intensity of the vorticity and the speed of the moving disturbance. Differently from the unforced problem, stagnation points can arise for small values of the vorticity as long as the moving disturbance travels sufficiently fast.