Open Access

Thi Thai Le, Yasuhide Fukumoto, Thorsten Koch

• The stability of shear layers in fluid flows is a crucial factor in forming vortices and jets and plays a fundamental role in the development of turbulence. Such shear layer instabilities are ubiquitous in natural phenomena, such as atmospheric and oceanic flows, contributing to the formation of weather systems and predicting tsunamis. This study specifically focuses on the stability of a shear layer sandwiched between two semi-infinite layers within a two-dimensional flow. The velocity profile of the shear layer is assumed to be linearly dependent on the vertical coordinate, while the velocity of the other layers remains uniform with differing strengths. The effect of viscosity and surface tension is ignored to simplify the analysis. The shallow water equations are used to analyze the interface stability of the shear layer, and the resulting dispersion relation between wave frequency and other wave characteristics is obtained. This relation incorporates Whittaker functions and their first derivatives and is used to derive appropriate limits corresponding to various physical conditions. Our study thus contributes to a deeper understanding of the stability of shear layers and their implications for natural phenomena.