In the present work, the instability of waves at the interface of the stratified flow of water and oil in a plane channel was numerically studied. This flow pattern, which is associated with the initial stages of slug formation, is common in industrial application in areas such as oil production, nuclear, chemical and many others. Through the introduction of controlled perturbations at the interface of a stratified flow, the evolution of the perturbations was analyzed based on hydrodynamics stability theories. Numerical experiments were performed using the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method of the ANSYS Fluent release 15.0 commercial simulator. The behavior of the flow in two different regimes with respect to the amplitude of the interfacial waves was analyzed. In the first regime, small enough waves were employed so that non-linear effects were negligible. The results obtained presented good agreement with the predictions provided by a solver of the Orr-Sommerfeld equations for stratified two-phase flow in a channel, indicating that the numerical tool was able to reproduce the behavior of the interfacial waves. It was shown that there is a range of amplitudes, around 0.2 per cent of the channel height, above which the non-linear effects become relevant. In the nonlinear regime, different scenarios of nonlinear interaction between waves, which are usually associated with transition from stratified flow pattern to slug flow, were evaluated. The most relevant scenario was identified, based on the efficiency of each independent interaction. It was observed that non-linear interactions between waves of similar length present the fastest growth. This mechanism seems to be dominant also in the presence of a large number of waves, as present in natural events. A weakly nonlinear model, based on the Stuart- Landau equations, was employed to model the wave behavior in the flow, obtaining an excellent agreement with the results of the simulations. This is interesting from a practical point of view, since it suggests that simple nonlinear models, such as the Stuart-Landau equation, can be implemented to improve the tools used to predict regime changes in two-phase flows.