Quenching of combustion by shear flows (Q2492109)

The authors consider a model describing premixed combustion in the presence of fluid flow: a reaction-diffusion equation with passive advection and ignition-type nonlinearity. What kinds of velocity profiles are capable for quenching (suppressing) any given flame, provided the velocity's amplitude is adequately large? Even for shear flows, the solution turns out to be surprisingly subtle. In this paper, they provide a sharp characterization of quenching for shear flows; the flow can quench any initial data if and only if the velocity profile does not have an interval larger than a certain critical size where it is identically constant. The efficiency of quenching depends strongly on the geometry and scaling of the flow. They discuss the cases of slowly and quickly varying flows, proving rigorously scaling laws that have been observed earlier in numerical experiments. The results require new estimates on the behavior of the solutions to the advection-enhanced diffusion equation, a classical model describing a wealth of phenomena in nature. The technique involves probabilistic and PDE estimates, in particular, applications of Malliavin calculus and the central limit theorem.