We describe a number of different phenomena seen in the free-surface flow inside a partially filled circular cylinder which is rotated about its horizontal axis of symmetry. At low angular velocities the flow settles into a steady two-dimensional flow with a front where the coating film coalesces with the pool at the bottom of the cylinder. This mode becomes unstable at higher angular velocities, initially to a sloshing mode on the rising side of the coating film and then to an axial instability on the front. The undulations that appear on the front grow into large-amplitude stationary patterns with cusp-like features for some parameter values. At still higher angular velocities and volume fractions, a number of different inertial instabilities and patterns appear. We present a phase diagram of the various transitions and characterize some of the more prominent instabilities and patterns in detail, along with some possible mechanisms for the observed behaviour.

We analyze the transition from annihilation to preservation of colliding waves. The analysis exploits the similarity between the local and global phase portraits of the system. The transition is shown to be the infinite-dimensional analog of the creation and annihilation of limit cycles in the plane via a homoclinic Andronov bifurcation, and has parallels to the nucleation theory of first-order phase transitions

When a thin sheet of a flexible material such as paper is fed from a horizontal spool towards a rough horizontal plane below it, the sheet folds on itself in a regular manner. We model this phenomenon as a free boundary problem for a nonlinearly elastic sheet, taking into account the stiffness and weight of the sheet and the height of the spool above the plane. By using a continuation scheme we solve the problem numerically and follow the evolution of one period of the fold for various values of the parameters. The results are found to agree well with observations of the folding of paper sheets.