Flammability limits of an oxidation reaction in a batch reactor. II: The Rychlý mechanism (Q1431712)

The authors consider the flammability limits of fuel-oxygen mixtures in a 2D-slab and intend to justify an approximation of this 2D problem by a similar one but posed in a 1D-slab and with another source term and another initial value for the temperature. The batch reactor is originally represented as a 2D-slab \(] 0,L[ \times ] 0,d[ \) (after a reduction based on the use of symmetries). The authors consider the coupled nonlinear reaction-diffusion system describing the evolution of the temperature, of the fuel fraction and of the oxygen fraction inside this batch reactor. Dirichlet, homogeneous Neumann or even Robin type boundary conditions are imposed on the different lines of the boundary of the 2D-slab. Initial values are imposed on these three quantities. The authors also introduce a quite similar problem posed in \(] 0,L[ \) but with a modified source term for the evolution of the temperature. An extra term \(\chi \mathcal{G}(T-T_{a}) \) is indeed introduced which represents the newtonian cooling. \(\chi \mathcal{G}\) represents an effective heat transfer parameter and \(T_{a}\) is the initial temperature in the original 2D-problem. In this 1D-problem, the initial temperature is also modified with the introduction of an extra term involving some gaussian quantity. The main purpose of the paper is devoted to the presentation and the discussion concerning the flammability limits for these two models. The authors prove that the approximation by the 1D-problem is correct for \( d<0,01\)m. The authors justify this assertion through curves describing the dependence of these flammability limits with respect to the parameter \(\chi \mathcal{G}\) and for different values of \(d\).