Towards an analytical understanding of internal wave attractors

Abstract

Time harmonic inviscid internal wave motions constrained to fully closed domains generically lead to singular velocity fields. In spite of this difficulty, several techniques exist to solve such internal wave boundary value problems. Recently it has been shown that for a domain with the shape of a trapezium, solutions can be written in terms of a double sine Fourier series. However, the solutions were found by a numerical technique and thus not all coefficients of the series are available. Unfortunately, for questions related e.g. to regularization of the inviscid singular solutions, the knowledge of the asymptotic behavior of the spectrum for large wave numbers is essential. Here we discuss solutions of internal wave boundary value problems for which the spectra are known, at least asymptotically. We further describe shortcomings of the found solutions that need to be overcome in the future. Finally, we sketch applications of the solutions in the context of viscous energy dissipation.