Weakly nonlinear waves in elastic rods have been studied by many authors. Most studies concentrated on smooth solutions only. However, when waves are of moderate length, non-smooth waves, such as peakons (or solitary shock waves), can arise (see Dai and Huo 2000). For strongly nonlinear waves (not assuming the smallness of the wave amplitude), as far as the authors are aware, only incompressibl...

Exact periodic and solitary travelling-wave solutions of the short pulse equation are derived.

In this paper, we develop a hydraulic theory to describe the occurrence and structure of slugging in a confined two-layer gas–liquid flow generated by prescribed, constant, upstream volumetric flow rates in each layer. A linearized theory for the uniform flow is established, after which we use bifurcation theory to study fully non-linear periodic travelling wave structures. We find that a two-p...

In this paper, the modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) equation with variable coefficients (vc-mKdV equation) is investigated via two kinds of approaches and symbolic computation. On the one hand, we firstly reduce the vc-mKdV equation to a second-order nonlinear nonhomogeneous ODE using travelling wave-like similarity transformation. And then we obtain its many types of exact fractional solution...

Zufiria’s higher-order Boussinesq type equations are studied by transforming them into solvable ordinary differential equations. Various families of their travelling wave solutions are generated, which include periodic wave, solitary wave, periodic-like wave, solitonlike wave, Jacobi elliptic function periodic wave, combined non-degenerative Jacobi elliptic function-like wave, Weierstrass ellip...