Wave regimes on a nonlinearly viscous fluid film flowing down a vertical plane

The flow of a thin film of a nonlinearly viscous fluid whose stress tensor is modeled by a power law, flowing down a vertical plane in the field of gravity, is considered. For the case of low flow rates, an equation that describes the evolution of surface disturbances is derived in the long-wave approximation. The domain of linear stability of the trivial solution is found, and weakly nonlinear, steady-state travelling solutions of this equation are obtained. The mechanism of branching of solution families at the singular point of the neutral curve is described. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005.