Direct numerical simulation is employed to study the effect of small-scale wall corrugations on scalar transfer through the wavy surface of a vertically falling liquid film in interaction with a strongly confined counter-current gas flow. Three wall geometries are considered: (i) a flat wall for reference; (ii) a sinusoidal corrugation typically found on structured packings in chemical engineering devices; and (iii) a heuristic design consisting of isolated semicircular bumps distanced by the wavelength of the surface waves. We consider the limiting case of a Dirichlet condition for the transported scalar (temperature or mass fraction) at the liquid–gas interface and focus on liquid-side transport. We consider convection-dominated regimes at moderate and large Péclet numbers, representative of heat and mass transfer respectively, and confront forced and noise-driven wave regimes. Our results show that sinusoidal wall corrugations increase transfer by up to 30 per cent in terms of the exchange length required to transfer a fixed amount of the transported quantity. A slightly greater intensification is achieved through the bump-shaped corrugations, which intermittently disrupt the moving-frame vortex forming within the large-amplitude solitary waves, allowing these to replenish with unsaturated liquid. However, when the velocity of the strongly confined gas flow is increased above a certain threshold, the bumps can trigger the flooding of the channel.

Exact solutions for multipolar azimuthal-mode vortices in two-dimensional Euler flows are presented. Flow solutions with non-vanishing far-field velocity are provided for any set of azimuthal wavenumbers $m$ and arbitrary number $n$ of vorticity shells. For azimuthal wavenumbers $m=0$ and $m=1$, the far-field velocity is a rigid motion and unsteady flow solutions with vanishing far-field velocity are obtained by means of a time-dependent change of reference frame. Addition of these first two modes, in the case of $n=1$, results in a particular Chaplygin–Lamb (C–L) dipole, with continuous and vanishing vorticity at the vortex boundary. Numerical simulations suggest that this particular C–L dipole is stable.