Internal wave attractors: different scenarios of instability
Résumé
This paper presents an experimental study of different instability scenarios in a parallelogram-shaped
internal wave attractor in a trapezoidal domain filled with a uniformly stratified fluid.
Energy is injected into the system via the oscillatory motion of a vertical wall of the trapezoidal domain.
Whole-field velocity measurements are performed with the conventional PIV technique.
In the linear regime, the total kinetic energy
of the fluid system is used to quantify the strength of attractors as a function of coordinates in the parameter space
defining their zone of existence, the so-called Arnold tongue. In the nonlinear regime, the choice of
the operational point in the Arnold tongue is shown to have a significant impact on the scenario of the
onset of triadic instability, most notably on the influence of confinement on secondary waves.
The onset of triadic resonance instability may occur as a spatially localized event similar to Scolan, Ermanyuk and Dauxois (2013) in the case of strong focusing
or in form of growing normal modes as in McEwan (1971) for the limiting case of rectangular domain. In the present paper, we describe
also a new intermediate scenario for the case of weak focusing.
We explore the long-term behaviour of cascades of triadic instabilities in wave attractors and show a persistent trend toward formation of standing-wave patterns corresponding to some discrete peaks of the frequency spectrum. At sufficiently high level of energy injection
the system exhibits a "mixing box" regime which has certain qualitatively universal properties regardless to the choice
of the operating point in the Arnold tongue. In particular, for this regime, we observe a statistics
of events with high horizontal vorticity, which serve as kinematic indicators of mixing.
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