Integral and integrable algorithms for a nonlinear shallow-water wave equation

  • Authors:

  • Roberto Camassa;Jingfang Huang;Long Lee

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC;Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC;Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computational Physics
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

An asymptotic higher-order model of wave dynamics in shallow water is examined in a combined analytical and numerical study, with the aim of establishing robust and efficient numerical solution methods. Based on the Hamiltonian structure of the nonlinear equation, an algorithm corresponding to a completely integrable particle lattice is implemented first. Each "particle" in the particle method travels along a characteristic curve. The resulting system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations can have solutions that blow-up in finite time. We isolate the conditions for global existence and prove l1-norm convergence of the method in the limit of zero spatial step size and infinite particles. The numerical results show that this method captures the essence of the solution without using an overly large number of particles. A fast summation algorithm is introduced to evaluate the integrals of the particle method so that the computational cost is reduced from O(N2) to O(N), where N is the number of particles. The method possesses some analogies with point vortex methods for 2D Euler equations. In particular, near singular solutions exist and singularities are prevented from occurring in finite time by mechanisms akin to those in the evolution of vortex patches. The second method is based on integro-differential formulations of the equation. Two different algorithms are proposed, based on different ways of extracting the time derivative of the dependent variable by an appropriately defined inverse operator. The integro-differential formulations reduce the order of spatial derivatives, thereby relaxing the stability constraint and allowing large time steps in an explicit numerical scheme. In addition to the Cauchy problem on the infinite line, we include results on the study of the nonlinear equation posed in the quarter (space-time) plane. We discuss the minimum number of boundary conditions required for solution uniqueness and illustrate this with numerical examples.