Speed-up of combustion fronts in shear flows

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the analysis of speed-up of reaction-diffusion-advection traveling fronts in infinite cylinders with periodic boundary conditions. The advection is a shear flow with a large amplitude and the reaction is nonnegative, with either positive or zero ignition temperature. The unique or minimal speeds of the traveling fronts are proved to be asymptotically linear in the flow amplitude as the latter goes to infinity, solving an open problem from Berestycki (Nonlinear PDEs in condensed matter and reactive flows, Kluwer, Doordrecht, 2003). The asymptotic growth rate is characterized explicitly as the unique or minimal speed of traveling fronts for a limiting degenerate problem, and the convergence of the regular traveling fronts to the degenerate ones is proved for positive ignition temperatures under an additional Hormander-type condition on the flow.