Faraday waves, streaming flow, and relaxation oscillations in nearly circular containers.

Faraday waves near onset in an elliptical container are described by a third-order system of ordinary differential equations with characteristic slow-fast structure. These equations describe the interaction of standing waves with a weakly damped streaming flow driven by Reynolds stresses in boundary layers at the free surface and the rigid walls, and capture the proliferation with decreasing damping of periodic and nonperiodic relaxation oscillations observed near onset in previous simulations. These structures are the result of slow drift through symmetry-related Hopf bifurcations.