Pulsating traveling waves in the singular limit of a reaction-diffusion system in solid combustion (Q2272066)

The authors consider a coupled system of parabolic and ordinary differential equations describing solid combustion. For the high activation energy limit, the limit function is shown to solve a free boundary problem which is a parabolic equation with a memory term. In the time-increasing case, the limit coincides with the Stefan problem. A complete characterization of the limit equation is given in the one space dimensional case. Then the authors apply their theory to two different systems, one is the Matkowsky-Sivashinsky scaling and the other is the scaling with temperature threshold. In the second part of this paper, the authors construct a family of pulsating traveling waves for the limit one phase Stefan problem with periodic coefficients. This construction is based on an integration in time which reduces the problem to an obstacle problem. Using an approximation procedure and the known existence result of pulsating traveling wave by Berestycki and Hamel in 2002, the existence of pulsating traveling wave for the limit problem is derived.