The relevance of a thin boundary layer for internal wave attractors

What is it about?

Internal wave motion associated with a single frequency (monochromatic) typically organizes itselfs along "internal wave attractors" in closed domains. Internal wave attractors are well-studied in rectangular tanks with one sloping side wall, also referred to as quasi two-dimensional trapezoidal domains. Previous studies considered the walls to be free-slip boundaries. It is known that this can be a reasonable approximation of the more appropriate no-slip boundaries if the associated boundary layers are sufficiently small. The question we answer is the following: Are the boundary layers in typical laboratory experiments on internal wave attractors in trapezoidal domains sufficiently small? We anser this question by constructing analytical solutions with a perturbational approach.

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