Two-dimensional fully adaptive solutions of solid-solid alloying reactions (Q1073565)

Solid-solid alloying reactions occur in a variety of pyrotechnical applications. They arise when a mixture of powders composed of appropriate oxidizing and reducing agents is heated. The large quantity of heat evolved produces a self-propagating reaction front that is often very narrow with sharp changes in both the temperature and the concentrations of the reacting species. Solution of problems of this type with an equispaced or midly nonuniform grid can be extremely inefficient. In this paper we develop a two-dimensional fully adaptive method for solving problems of this class. The method adaptively adjusts the number of grid points needed to equidistribute a positive weight function over a given mesh interval in each direction at each time level. We monitor the solution from one time level to another to ensure that the local error per unit step associated with the time differencing method is below some specified tolerance. The method is applied to several examples involving exothermic, diffusion-controlled, self-propagating reactions in packed bed reactors.