1. Introduction

The investigation of the exact solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations plays an important role in mathematics, physics, and other applied science areas. In recent years, a variety of powerful methods has been proposed and analyzed to construct the explicit exact solutions to nonlinear evolution equations. Among these methods, the Exp-function method proposed by He and Wu [1] is particularly notable in its power and applicability in solving nonlinear problems, and it has been successfully applied to many kinds of nonlinear partial differential equations [2–17]. All of these applications verified that the Exp-function method is a straightforward, efficient, and versatile technique for finding generalized solitary, periodic, and rational solutions for nonlinear evolution equations as well as for revealing intriguing characteristics of various inner-wave interactions.

The KdV-Burgers-Kuramoto equation [18, 19] is where , , , and are constants. This equation is an important mathematical model arising in many different physical contexts to describe many phenomena which are simultaneously involved in nonlinearity, dissipation, dispersion, and instability, especially at the description of turbulence processes. Since the solutions possess their actual physical application [20], various effective methods have been applied to construct the exact solutions of the KdV-Burgers-Kuramoto equation. These methods include the tanh function method [21–23], the homogeneous balance method [24], and the generalized F-expansion method [20]. As a consequence, it is still a significant and interesting task to search for new explicit exact solutions for nonlinear evolution equations. In the present work we extend the Exp-function method in combination with the truncated Painlevé expansion method [25, 26] to obtain new nontrivial exact solitary wave solutions to the KdV-Burgers-Kuramoto equation (1.1). As a result, we have found some new exact solitary wave solutions to (1.1) in the case where the Exp-function method provides trivial solutions only, which will be investigated in more detail in the following section.

2. Solitary Wave Solutions by the Exp-Function Method

Using the transformation , , (1.1) becomes the ordinary differential equation:

According to the Exp-function method [1], we assume that the solution of (2.1) can be expressed in the form where , , , and are positive integers, and are unknown constants, which are to be determined later.

By balancing the linear term of the highest order in (2.1) with the highest order nonlinear term, we get , and, thus, . Similarly, balancing the linear term of the lowest order in (2.1) with the lowest order nonlinear term yields . Here, the values of and can be freely chosen [1]. With the help of Maple, we have obtained only trivial solutions of (1.1) for the cases where (i) and , (ii) and , and (iii) and , but one new solitary wave solution in the case where and , which is given by where , and are arbitrary constants, and the coefficients , , , are free parameters. We expect that the other cases for the values of and will produce nontrivial solitary wave solutions to (1.1). In the next section we will consider finding new exact solitary wave solutions to (1.1) in the case where the Exp-function method provides trivial solutions only, particularly when and .

3. New Solitary Wave Solutions to the KdV-Burgers-Kuramoto Equation

Let us consider the KdV-Burgers-Kuramoto equation defined by (1.1). The truncated Painlevé expansion method will be adopted to find a dependent variable transformation for finding solitary wave solutions to the considered equation. Substituting in the form into (1.1) and finding the order of the pole for the solution and the functions , we obtain the dependent variable transformation where . Throughout the remainder of this paper we assume that and satisfy the condition .

Substitution of this transformation into the KdV-Burgers-Kuramoto equation (1.1) yields a rather complicated system of nonlinear equations in for which we seek the solution form of the Exp-function method [1]: where .

For the sake of simplicity, we choose and . Based on the consideration in (3.2) and (3.3), in this paper we assume that (1.1) admits a generalized solitary wave solution of the form where where