Weakly nonlinear models for hydroelastic water waves

Abstract: In this work, we derive reduced interface models for hydroelastic water waves coupled to a nonlinear viscoelastic plate. In a weakly nonlinear small-steepness regime we obtain bidirectional nonlocal evolution equations capturing the interface dynamics up to quadratic order, and we also derive two unidirectional models describing one-way propagation while retaining the leading dispersive and dissipative effects induced by the plate. Remarkably, one of the bidirectional model has a doubly nonlinear structure in the sense that there there is a nonlinear elliptic operator acting on the acceleration of the interface. We prove local well-posedness for the bidirectional model for small data via a two-parameter regularization and nested fixed points. For the unidirectional models, we obtain local well-posedness for arbitrary data and global well-posedness for small data.