CONSERVATION LAWS FOR ONE-DIMENSIONAL SHALLOW WATER MODELS FOR ONE AND TWO-LAYER FLOWS

A full set of conservation laws for the two-layer shallow water equations is presented for the one-dimensional case. We prove that all the conservation laws are linear combination of the equations for the conservation of mass and velocity (in each layer), total momentum and total energy.This result generalizes that of Montgomery and Moodie that found the same conserved quantities by restricting their search to the multinomials expressions in the layer variables. Though the question of whether or not there are only a finite number of these quantities is left as an open question by the authors. Our work puts an end to this: in fact, no more conservation laws are admitted for the two-layer shallow water equations. The key mathematical ingredient of the method proposed leading to the result is the Frobenius problem. Moreover, we present a full set of conservation laws for the classical one-dimensional shallow water model with topography, by using the same techniques.