Nonautonomous soliton solutions for a nonintegrable Korteweg–de Vries equation with variable coefficients by the variational approach

A nonintegrable Korteweg–de Vries equation with variable coefficients is investigated in this paper. Due to the existence of variable coefficients, the equation becomes nonintegrable, which leads to the invalidity of the traditional analytical methods to obtain soliton solutions. In order to overcome this difficulty, the variational approach is employed in this paper. The variational principle corresponding to this nonintegrable equation is established. Based on that, the first- and second-order nonautonomous soliton solutions are derived. We note that the obtained solutions can be degenerated to the integrable cases. Properties of the nonautonomous solitons and influence of the variable coefficients are discussed.