Nonlinear behaviour of contained inertia waves

Rotating fluid-filled containers are systems which admit inertial oscillations, which at appropriate frequencies can be represented as inertia wave modes. When forced by a time-dependent perturbation, systems of contained inertia waves have been shown, in a number of experimental studies, to exhibit complex and varied breakdown phenomena. It is particularly hard to determine a forcing amplitude below which breakdowns do not occur but at which linear wave behaviour is still measurable. In this paper, experiments are presented where modes of higher order than the fundamental are forced. These modes exhibit more complex departures from linear inviscid behaviour than the fundamental mode. However, the experiments on higher-order modes show that instabilities begin at nodal planes. It is shown that even a weakly nonlinear contained inertia-wave system is one in which unexpectedly efficient interactions with higher-order modes can occur, leading to ubiquitous breakdowns. An experiment with the fundamental mode illustrates the system's preference for complex transitions to chaos.