D. Lannes, Lecture notes volume of the Winter School on Fluid Dynamics, Dispersive Equations and Quantum Fluids (Bressanone, december 2018), to appear. Download

The goal of these notes is to point out similarities and differences between two kinds of initial boundary value problems in dimension one. The first one concerns hyperbolic systems (such as the nonlinear shallow water equations) while the second one concerns dispersive perturbations of such systems (such as Boussinesq systems). In the absence of a boundary, that is, for the initial value problem, the link between both classes is quite obvious but in the presence of a boundary, the situation is more complex and dispersive boundary layers must be understood if one wants to understand the links between both classes of problems. After reviewing several types of initial boundary value problems (some of which being free boundary problems) arising in the study of waves in shallow water, we sketch the general theory for hyperbolic initial boundary value problems developed in [18] and that encompasses all of the above examples that involve hyperbolic systems. Such a general theory does not exist for dispersive perturbations of hyperbolic systems, but we treat two important examples involving Boussinesq systems. In the first one, we show that the nature of the initial boundary value problem shares little in common with the hyperbolic configuration. For instance, the problem has the structure of an ODE and no higher order compatibility conditions on the data are required to have solutions of high regularity. These differences naturally raise the questions of the control of the time of existence and of the dispersionless limit; they are addressed in a second example motivated by a wave-structure interaction problem. We explain the approach developed in [13] to treat this problem, pointing out the role played by dispersive boundary layers.