Faraday instability threshold in large-aspect-ratio containers

Abstract

We consider the Floquet linear problem giving the threshold acceleration for the appearance of Faraday waves in large-aspect-ratio containers, without further restrictions on the values of the parameters. We classify all distinguished limits for varying values of the various parameters and simplify the exact problem in each limit. The resulting simplified problems either admit closed-form solutions or are solved numerically by the well-known method introduced by Kumar & Tuckerman (1994). Some comparisons are made with ( a ) the numerical solution of the original exact problem, ( b ) some ad hoc approximations in the literature, and ( c ) some experimental results.