Period doubling and chaotic transient in a model of chain-branching combustion wave propagation

Abstract

The propagation of planar combustion waves in an adiabatic model with two-step chain-branching reaction mechanism is investigated. The travelling combustion wave becomes unstable with respect to pulsating perturbations as the critical parameter values for the Hopf bifurcation are crossed in the parameter space. The Hopf bifurcation is demonstrated to be of a supercritical nature and it gives rise to periodic pulsating combustion waves as the neutral stability boundary is crossed. The increase of the ambient temperature is found to have a stabilizing effect on the propagation of the combustion waves. However, it does not qualitatively change the behaviour of the travelling combustion waves. Further increase of the bifurcation parameter leads to the period-doubling bifurcation cascade and a chaotic regime of combustion wave propagation. The chaotic regime has a transient nature and the combustion wave extinguishes when the bifurcation parameter becomes sufficiently large. For Lewis numbers of fuel close to unity, the parameter regions where pulsating solutions exist become very close to each other and this makes it difficult to experimentally observe the period-doubling. It is shown that the average velocity of pulsating waves is less than the speed of the travelling wave for the same parameter values.