Transcritical flow over a hole

Abstract

Transcritical flow over a localized obstacle generates upstream and downstream nonlinear wavetrains. In the weakly nonlinear long-wave regime, this flow has been modeled with the forced Korteweg-de Vries (fKdV) equation, where numerical simulations and asymptotic solutions have demonstrated that the upstream and downstream nonlinear wavetrains have the structure of unsteady undular bores, connected by a locally steady solution over the obstacle. Further, it has been shown that when the obstacle is replaced by a step of semi-infinite length, it is found that a positive step generates only an upstream-propagating undular bore, and a negative step generates only a downstream-propagating undular bore. This result suggests that for flow over a hole, that is a step down followed by a step up, the two wavetrains generated will interact over the hole. In this paper, this situation is explored by numerical simulations of the fKdV equation. © 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.