Global bifurcation for steady viscous roll waves on an incline

We construct a branch of travelling periodic `roll wave' solutions to the free-boundary incompressible Navier--Stokes equations on an inclined plane in two dimensions.

These solutions bifurcate from a parallel shear flow, under natural assumptions on the related Orr--Sommerfeld equation.

Using techniques from analytic global bifurcation theory, we extend the local branch to a global curve of solutions.

A key step of the proof is reformulating the problem, including the unknown free boundary, as an elliptic system in the sense of Agmon--Douglis--Nirenberg.

Finally, we verify the hypotheses on the Orr--Sommerfeld equation for two regimes: small wavenumber and low Reynolds number.