2023/09/21 by Josh Shelton, Shelton, Josh, Philippe H. Trinh +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · #Coastal and Marine Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn) #Ocean Waves and Remote Sensing #Wave and Wind Energy Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.11779
openalex publication_date 2023/09/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this work, we develop a linear model ODE to study the parasitic capillary ripples present on steep Stokes waves when a small amount of surface tension is included in the formulation. Our methodology builds upon the exponential asymptotic theory of Shelton & Trinh (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 939, 2022, A17), who demonstrated that these ripples occur beyond-all-orders of a small-surface-tension expansion. Our model equation, a linear ODE forced by solutions of the Stokes wave equation, forms a convenient tool to calculate numerical and asymptotic solutions. We show analytically that the parasitic capillary ripples that emerge in solutions to this linear model have the same asymptotic scaling and functional behaviour as those in the fully nonlinear problem. It is expected that this work will lead to the study of parasitic capillary ripples that occur in more general formulations involving viscosity or time-dependence.