Detonatlve travelling waves for combustions

Abstract

The existence of travelling wave solution to equations of a viscous heat conducting combustible fluid is proved. The reactions are assumed to be one step exothermic reactions with a natural discontinuous reaction rate function. The problem is studied for a general gas. Instead of assuming the ideal gas conditions we consider a general thermodynamics which is described by a fairly mild set of hypotheses. Travelling waves for detonations reduce to specific heteroclinic orbits of a discontinuous system of ODE's. The existence proof for heteroclinic orbits corresponding to weak and strong detonation waves is carried out by some general topological arguments in ODE. The uniqueness and nonuniqueness of these waves are also considered.

Keywords:

• Combustion
• detonations
• shock waves
• travelling waves

AMS:

• 34A34
• 34C37
• 76L05
• 80A25