The extended fifth-order KdV equation in fluids is investigated in this paper. Based on the concept of pseudopotential, a direct and unifying Riccati-type pseudopotential approach is employed to achieve Lax pair and singularity manifold equation of this equation. Moreover, this equation is classified into three categories: extended Caudrey–Dodd–Gibbon–Sawada–Kotera (CDGSK) equation, extended Lax equation and extended Kaup–Kuperschmidt (KK) equation. The corresponding singularity manifold equations and auto-Bäcklund transformations of these three equations are also obtained. Furthermore, the infinitely many conservation laws of the extended Lax equation are found using its Lax pair. All conserved densities and fluxes are given with explicit recursion formulas.

In this paper, we propose a generalised perturbation ($n, N − n$)-fold Darboux transformation (DT) of the modified Korteweg–de Vries (mKdV) equation using the Taylor expansion and a parameter limit procedure. We apply the generalised perturbation ($1, N − 1$)-fold DT to find the new explicit higher-order rational soliton (RS) solutions in terms of determinants of the mKdV equation. These higher-order RS solutions are different from those known soliton results in terms of hyperbolic functions which are obtained from the classical iterated DT. The dynamics behaviours of the first-, second-, third-, and fourth-order RS solutions are shown graphically. The wave propagation characteristics and stability are also discussed using numerical simulations. We find that the initial constant seed solution plays an important role on the wave propagation stability of RS. Through Miura transformation, we give some complex higher-order rational solutions of the Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) equation which are different from the known results. The relevant structures also are discussed using some figures. The method used can also be extended to seek explicit rational solutions of other nonlinear integrable equations.