Well-posedness of a nonlinear shallow water model for an oscillating water column with time-dependent air pressure.

We propose in this paper a new nonlinear mathematical model of an oscillating water column. The one-dimensional shallow water equations in the presence of this device are essentially reformulated as two transmission problems: the first one is associated with a step in front of the device and the second one is related to the interaction between waves and a fixed partially-immersed structure. By taking advantage of free surface Bernoulli's equation, we close the system by deriving a transmission condition that involves a time-dependent air pressure inside the chamber of the device, instead of a constant atmospheric pressure as in the previous work \cite{bocchihevergara2021}. We then show that the second transmission problem can be reduced to a quasilinear hyperbolic initial boundary value problem with a semilinear boundary condition determined by an ODE depending on the trace of the solution to the PDE at the boundary. Local well-posedness for general problems of this type is established via an iterative scheme by using linear estimates for the PDE and nonlinear estimates for the ODE. Finally, the well-posedness of the transmission problem related to the wave-structure interaction in the oscillating water column is obtained as an application of the general theory.