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Gravity-Driven Thin Liquid Films With Insoluble Surfactant: Smooth Traveling Waves, Rachel Levy, Michael Shearer, Thomas P. Witelski

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The flow of a thin layer of fluid down an inclined plane is modified by the presence of insoluble surfactant. For any finite surfactant mass, traveling waves are constructed for a system of lubrication equations describing the evolution of the free-surface fluid height and the surfactant concentration. The one-parameter family of solutions is investigated using perturbation theory with three small parameters: the coefficient of surface tension, the surfactant diffusivity, and the coefficient of the gravity-driven diffusive spreading of the fluid. When all three parameters are zero, the nonlinear PDE system is hyperbolic/degenerateparabolic, and admits traveling wave solutions in which the …