材料期刊网

A head-on collision between two solitary waves from opposite directions in a Rayleigh-Benard convecting fluid is investigated by use of the Poincare-Lighthill-Kuo method. The fluid system is bounded below by an isothermic plane and above a free deformable surface on which a heat flux is fixed. The results show that, near the transition of the long-wavelength oscillatory instability, the solitary waves emerging from the collision can preserve their original identities to the second order. The phase shifts due to the collision are calculated explicitly.