Oblique interaction of internal solitary waves in a two-layer fluid of infinite depth

Oblique interaction of internal solitary waves in a two-layer fluid system with infinite depth is studied. Two-dimensional Benjamin-Ono (BO) equation is solved numerically to investigate the strong interactions of the non-lin ear long waves whose propagation directions are very close to each other. C omputations of time development are performed for two initial settings: the first one is superposition of two BO solitons with the same amplitude and with different propagation directions, and the second one is an oblique ref lection of a BO soliton at a vertical wall. It is observed that the Mach re flection does occur for small incident angles and for some incident angles very large stem waves are generated. (C) 2001 Published by The Japan Societ y of Fluid Mechanics and Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.