Estimations of the parameters of a thermal explosion in a triaxial ellipsoid (Q777337)

The authors analyze the thermal behavior of an ellipsoid \(V\), whose temperature is the solution of the elliptic equation \(\nabla ^{2}T(M)+\frac{q_{\ast }}{\lambda }\exp (-\frac{W}{k_{0}T(M)})=0\), \(\forall M\in V\), with the boundary condition \(T(P)=T_{\ast }\), on \(\partial V=S\). Here \(\lambda \) is the thermal conductivity, \(q_{\ast }\) is the pre-exponential factor, \(W\) is the activation energy of the exothermic process and \(k_{0}\) is the Boltzmann constant. The authors build the associated variational formulation and energy functional. They introduce a change of variables with a dimensionless temperature \(\Theta =(T/T_{\ast }-1)/\gamma \), where \(\gamma =k_{0}T_{\ast }/W\), and dimensionless coordinates \(\xi _{i}=x_{i}/b_{i}\), \(i=1,2,3\), and they slightly modify the energy functional and the partial differential equation written in these dimensionless coordinates. They introduce the functions \(\Theta _{0}(\xi _{1},\xi _{2},\xi _{3})=B(1-\xi_{1}^{2}-\xi _{2}^{2}-\xi _{3}^{2})\) and \(\Theta _{1}(\xi _{1},\xi _{2},\xi_{3})=B(1-\xi _{1}^{2}-\xi _{2}^{2}-\xi _{3}^{2})(1+L(\xi _{1}^{2}+\xi_{2}^{2}+\xi _{3}^{2}))\) which approximate the solution of the above problem and they look for stationary points of a modified energy functional. The last part of the paper presents results of numerical simulations concerning the stationary points for different shapes of the ellipsoid and different values of the parameters involved in the model. The authors especially compute values of the error expressed in an integral form.