This paper is devoted to the well-posedness theory of piston problem for compressible {combustion} Euler flows with physical ignition condition. A significant combustion phenomena called detonation will occur provided the reactant is compressed and ignited by a leading shock. Mathematically, the problem can be formulated as an initial-boundary value problem for hyperbolic balance laws with a large shock front as free boundary. In present paper, we establish the global well-posedness of entropy solutions via wave front tracking scheme within the framework of $BV\cap L^1$ space. The main difficulties here stem from the discontinuous source term without uniform dissipation structure, and from the characteristic-boundary associated with degenerate characteristic field. In dealing with the obstacles caused by ignition temperature, we develop a modified Glimm-type functional to control the oscillation growth of combustion waves, even if the exothermic source fails to uniformly decay. As to the characteristic boundary, the degeneracy of contact discontinuity is fully employed to get elegant stability estimates near the piston boundary. Meanwhile, we devise a weighted Lyapunov functional to balance the nonlinear effects arising from large shock, characteristic boundary and exothermic reaction, then obtain the $L^1-$stability of combustion wave solutions. Our results reveal that one dimensional \emph{ZND} detonation waves {supported} by a forward piston are indeed nonlinearly stable under small perturbation in $BV$ sense. This is the first work on well-posedness of inviscid reacting Euler fluids dominated by ignition temperature.
We prove the existence and uniqueness, up to a shift in time, of curved traveling fronts for a reaction-advection-diffusion equation with a combustion-type nonlinearity. The advection is through a shear flow $q$. This analyzes, for instance, the shape of flames produced by a Bunsen burner in the presence of advection. We also give a formula for the speed of propagation of these conical fronts in terms of the well-known speed of planar pulsating traveling waves.
We study front solutions of a system that models combustion in highly hydraulically resistant porous media. The spectral stability of the fronts is tackled by a combination of energy estimates and numerical Evans function computations. Our results suggest that there is a parameter regime for which there are no unstable eigenvalues. We use recent works about partially parabolic systems to prove that in the absence of unstable eigenvalues the fronts are convectively stable.
We revisit the Near Equidiffusional Flames (NEF) model introduced by Matkowsky and Sivashinsky in 1979 and consider a simplified, quasi-steady version of it. This simplification allows, near the planar front, an explicit derivation of the front equation. The latter is a pseudodifferential fully nonlinear parabolic equation of the fourth-order. First, we study the (orbital) stability of the null solution. Second, introducing a parameter $ε$, we rescale both the dependent and independent variables and prove rigourously the convergence to the solution of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation as $ε\to…
We consider the propagation of a flame front in a solid periodic medium. The model is governed by a free boundary system in which the front's velocity depends on the temperature via a kinetic rate which may degenerate. We show the existence of travelling wave solutions which are bounded and global. Previous results by the same authors (cf. Alibaud, Namah, On the propagation of a periodic flame front by an Arrhenius kinetic,{\it Interfaces Free Bound.,} 2017) were obtained for essentially positively lower bounded kinetics or eventually which have some very weak degeneracy. Here we consider gene…
This paper is concerned with the analysis of speed-up of reaction-diffusion-advection traveling fronts in infinite cylinders with periodic boundary conditions. The advection is a shear flow with a large amplitude and the reaction is nonnegative, with either positive or zero ignition temperature. The unique or minimal speeds of the traveling fronts are proved to be asymptotically linear in the flow amplitude as the latter goes to infinity, solving an open problem from \cite{b}. The asymptotic growth rate is characterized explicitly as the unique or minimal speed of traveling fronts for a limiti…
For a class of reaction-diffusion equations describing propagation phenomena, we prove that for any entire solution $u$, the level set $\{u=λ\}$ is a Lipschitz graph in the time direction if $λ$ is close to $1$. Under a further assumption that $u$ connects $0$ and $1$, it is shown that all level sets are Lipschitz graphs. By a blowing down analysis, the large scale motion law for these level sets and a characterization of the minimal speed for travelling waves are also given.
On dynamics of gasless combustion in slowly varying periodic media: periodic fronts, their stability and propagation-extinction-diffusion-reignition pattern
In this paper, we solve constructively the piston problem for one-dimensional isentropic Euler equations of modified Chaplygin gas. In solutions, we prove rigorously the global existence and uniqueness of a shock wave separating constant states ahead of the piston when the piston pushed forward into the gas. It is quite different from the results of Chaplygin gas or generalized Chaplygin gas in which a Radon measure solution is constructed to deal with concentration of mass on the piston. When the piston pulled back from the gas, we strictly confirm only the first family rarefaction wave exist…
We prove that the steady state of a class of multidimensional reaction-diffusion systems is asymptotically stable at the intersection of unweighted space and exponentially weighted Sobolev spaces, and pay particular attention to a special case, namely, systems of equations that arise in combustion theory. The steady-state solutions considered here are the end states of the traveling fronts associated with the systems, and thus the present results complement recent papers \cite{GLS1, GLS2, GLS3, GLSR, GLY} that study the stability of traveling fronts.
Predicting turbulent flame speed (the large time front speed) is a fundamental problem in turbulent combustion theory. Several models have been proposed to study the turbulent flame speed, such as the G-equations, the F-equations (Majda-Souganidis model) and reaction-diffusion-advection (RDA) equations. In the first part of this paper, we show that flow induced strain reduces front speeds of G-equations in periodic compressible and shear flows. The F-equations arise in asymptotic analysis of reaction-diffusion-advection equations and are quadratically nonlinear analogues of the G-equations. In…
We consider a free interface problem which stems from a solid-gas model in combustion with pattern formation. We derive a third-order, fully nonlinear, self-consistent equation for the flame front. Asymptotic methods reveal that the interface approaches a solution of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. Numerical results are presented which illustrate the dynamics.
We study analytically and numerically a model describing front propagation of a KPP reaction in a fluid flow. The model consists of coupled one-dimensional reaction-diffusion equations with different drift coefficients. The main rigorous results give lower bounds for the speed of propagation that are linear in the drift coefficient, which agrees very well with the numerical observations. In addition, we find the optimal constant in a functional inequality of independent interest used in the proof.
We prove the existence of a global solution to the Cauchy problem for a nonlinear reaction-diffusion system coupled with a system of ordinary differential equations. The system models the propagation of a combustion front in a porous medium with two layers, as derived by J. C. da Mota and S. Schecter in Combustion fronts in a porous medium with two layers, Journal of Dynamics and Differential Equations, 18(3) (2006). For the particular case, when the fuel concentrations in both layers are known functions, the Cauchy problem was solved by J. C. da Mota and M. M. Santos in An application of the …
This study proved that the Cauchy problem for a one-dimensional reaction-diffusion-convection system is locally and globally well-posed in $\mathtt{H}^2(\mathbb{R})$. The system modeled a gasless combustion front through a multi-layer porous medium when the fuel concentration in each layer was a known function. Combustion has critical practical porous media applications, such as in in-situ combustion processes in oil reservoirs and several other areas. Earlier studies considered physical parameters (e.g., porosity, thermal conductivity, heat capacity, and initial fuel concentration ) constant.…
We study long time dynamics of combustive processes in random media, modeled by reaction-diffusion equations with random ignition reactions. One expects that under reasonable hypotheses on the randomness, large space-time scale dynamics of solutions to these equations is almost surely governed by a different effective PDE, which should be a homogeneous Hamilton-Jacobi equation. While this was previously proved in one dimension as well as for isotropic reactions in several dimensions (i.e., with radially symmetric laws), we provide here the first proof of this phenomenon in the general non-isot…
We study flow-induced enhancement of the speed of pulsating traveling fronts for reaction-diffusion equations, and quenching of reaction by fluid flows. We prove, for periodic flows in two dimensions and any combustion-type reaction, that the front speed is proportional to the square root of the (homogenized) effective diffusivity of the flow. We show that this result does not hold in three and more dimensions. We also prove conjectures from [1,3,11] for cellular flows, concerning the rate of speed-up of fronts and the minimal flow amplitude necessary to quench solutions with initial data of a…
We consider reaction-diffusion equations with combustion-type non-linearities in two dimensions and study speed-up of their pulsating fronts by general periodic incompressible flows with a cellular structure. We show that the occurence of front speed-up in the sense $\lim_{A\to\infty} c_*(A)=\infty$, with $A$ the amplitude of the flow and $c_*(A)$ the (minimal) front speed, only depends on the geometry of the flow and not on the reaction function. In particular, front speed-up happens for KPP reactions if and only if it does for ignition reactions. We also show that the flows which achieve thi…
Speed ensemble of bistable (combustion) fronts in mean zero stationary Gaussian shear flows inside two and three dimensional channels is studied with a min-max variational principle. In the small root mean square regime of shear flows, a new class of multi-scale test functions are found to yield speed asymptotics. The quadratic speed enhancement law holds with probability arbitrarily close to one under the almost sure continuity (dimension two) and mean square Hölder regularity (dimension three) of the shear flows. Remarks are made on the conditions for the linear growth of front speed expecta…
The main goal of this paper is to understand finer properties of the effective burning velocity from a combustion model introduced by Majda and Souganidis [19]. Motivated by results in [4] and applications in turbulent combustion, we show that when the dimension is two and the flow of the ambient fluid is either weak or very strong, the level set of the effective burning velocity has flat pieces. Due to the lack of an applicable Hopf-type rigidity result, we need to identify the exact location of at least one flat piece. Implications on the effective flame front and other related inverse type …
We prove the existence and uniqueness of a traveling front and of its speed for the homogeneous heat equation in the half-plane with a Neumann boundary reaction term of non-balanced bistable type or of combustion type. We also establish the monotonicity of the front and, in the bistable case, its behavior at infinity. In contrast with the classical bistable interior reaction model, its behavior at the side of the invading state is of power type, while at the side of the invaded state its decay is exponential. These decay results rely on the construction of a family of explicit bistable traveli…
G-equations are well-known front propagation models in turbulent combustion and describe the front motion law in the form of local normal velocity equal to a constant (laminar speed) plus the normal projection of fluid velocity. In level set formulation, G-equations are Hamilton-Jacobi equations with convex ($L^1$ type) but non-coercive Hamiltonians. Viscous G-equations arise from either numerical approximations or regularizations by small diffusion. The nonlinear eigenvalue $\bar H$ from the cell problem of the viscous G-equation can be viewed as an approximation of the inviscid turbulent fla…
The Arnold-Beltrami-Childress (ABC) flow and the Kolmogorov flow are three dimensional periodic divergence free velocity fields that exhibit chaotic streamlines. We are interested in front speed enhancement in G-equation of turbulent combustion by large intensity ABC and Kolmogorov flows. We give a quantitative construction of the ballistic orbits of ABC and Kolmogorov flows, namely those with maximal large time asymptotic speeds in a coordinate direction. Thanks to the optimal control theory of G-equation (a convex but non-coercive Hamilton-Jacobi equation), the ballistic orbits serve as admi…
We consider in this paper a reaction-diffusion system under a KPP hypothesis in a cylindrical domain in the presence of a shear flow. Such systems arise in predator-prey models as well as in combustion models with heat losses. Similarly to the single equation case, the existence of a minimal speed c* and of traveling front solutions for every speed c > c* has been shown both in the cases of heat losses distributed inside the domain or on the boundary. Here, we deal with the accordance between the two models by choosing heat losses inside the domain which tend to a Dirac mass located on the bou…
We study nonlinear diffusion problems of the form $u_t=u_{xx}+f(u)$ with free boundaries. Such problems may be used to describe the spreading of a biological or chemical species, with the free boundary representing the expanding front. For special $f(u)$ of the Fisher-KPP type, the problem was investigated by Du and Lin [8]. Here we consider much more general nonlinear terms. For any $f(u)$ which is $C^1$ and satisfies $f(0)=0$, we show that the omega limit set $ω(u)$ of every bounded positive solution is determined by a stationary solution. For monostable, bistable and combustion types of non…
