ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

2pPA2. A study on the onset to chaos of hydrodynamic nonpropagating solitary wave motion.

Guoqing Miao

Rongjue Wei

Lab. of Modern Acoust., The Inst. of Acoust., Nanjing Univ., Nanjing 210008, People's Republic of China

Previous experiments have shown that the onset to chaos would occur at points outside the stability region of the hydrodynamic nonpropagating soliton generated in a Faraday's oscillating water tank driven harmonically [Wei et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 88, 469--472 (1990)]. The purpose of the present paper will put emphasis for the first time on the study of the same phenomenon which occurred inside the stability region for those states that have strong stability. The present experiment is conducted in a rectangular water tank driven harmonically at (0,1) mode. Some observations include a single soliton in a very short tank, a double soliton, and a multisoliton, etc. Some porous materials were used at both ends of the tank to quench undesired resonant modes. For several tanks 10--35 cm long and 3 cm wide filled with water to a depth of 2 cm, a typical set of frequency spectrums have been obtained which show the transition from simple periodic to bifurcate, even to chaotic state intermittently. This experiment gives additional support to the idea that the chaos is out of order and the soliton is a form of order out of the potential chaos. [Work supported by National Scientific Foundation of China.]