Interaction of Nearly-Inviscid, Multi-mode Faraday Waves and Mean Flows

Abstract

Faraday waves [1] are gravity-capillary waves that are excited on the surface of a fluid when its container is vibrated vertically and the vertical acceleration exceeds a threshold value. These waves have received much attention in the literature both as a basic fluid dynamical problem and as a paradigm of a pattern-forming system [2-4]. Unfortunately, in the low viscosity limit, there are several basic issues that remain unresolved, particularly in connection with the generation of mean flows in the bulk. The viscous part of these flows (also called streaming flow or acoustic streaming) is driven by the oscillatory boundary layers attached to the solid walls and the free surface by well-known mechanisms first uncovered by Schlichting [5] and Longuet-Higgins [6]. This mean flow has been shown recently to affect the dynamics of the primary waves at leading order in a related, laterally vibrated system [7]. This is somewhat similar to the effect of an internal circulation on surface wave dynamics in drops [8].