For many years, prediction of the linear decay of surface waves in a container proved to be a surprisingly challenging task. Calculations, which attributed the damping due to Stokes boundary layers near the container walls, typically underestimated measured damping rates by wide margins. This difficulty has impeded progress toward developing a fully self-consistent weakly nonlinear theory for the evolution of waves in fundamental and practical problems involving confined liquids with free surfaces. Recent theoretical work by Martel et al. (J. Fluid Mech. 360 213 (1998)) suggested that the discrepancies could be substantially resolved by including viscous damping in the bulk. Our experiments tested these predictions rigorously over a two-order-of-magnitude range in Reynolds number.
D. R. Howell, B. Buhrow, T. Heath, C. McKenna, W. Hwong, and M. F. Schatz "Measurements of surface-wave-damping in a container" Phys. Fluids 12, 322-326 (2000). (
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