Reactive-diffusive equation with variable pre-exponential factor (Q597630)

The author considers a steady state problem for the temperature in a 1D slab with a variable pre-exponential factor. This models an exothermic chemical reaction with an Arrhenius term multiplied by a variable pre-exponential factor. After some transformations of the original problem, he is faced to the second-order nonlinear differential equation: \[ d^{2}\theta /dx^{2}+\delta(1+\varepsilon \theta)^{r}\exp(\theta /( 1+\varepsilon \theta)) \text{ in }] -1,1[ \] with the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions \(\theta(\pm 1) =0\). Here, \(\delta \) is Frank-Kamenetskii parameter and \(\varepsilon \) is the activation energy parameter. The author specially considers the case \(r=-2\) and he changes the boundary conditions as \(\theta(1) =0\); \( \theta(0) =\theta _{m}\) and \(\theta ^{\prime }( 0) =0 \) where \(\theta _{m}\) is an unknown constant. The parameter \(\delta \) can be computed in terms of this \(\theta _{m}\). The purpose of this work is to compare the exact value expression of \(\delta \) (which involves an integral which is computed using Simpson's rule) with some ``first-order term'' (with respect to the integrand) of this expression when considering \(\varepsilon \ll 1 \). This ``first-order term'' has already been introduced by Frank and Kamenetskii. He then concludes his work with some further properties of this approximation.