Back to Departmental Colloquium: Spring 2000
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Thursday, Mar 2, 2000
Time: 4:15PM
Location: JWB 335
Leonid Ryzhik
Universty of Chicago
Title |
Advection enhanced reaction-diffusion |
Abstract |
The enhancement effect of wind or fluid motion on the rate of chemical reactions, and front propagation in general, is a well known phenomenon, that occurs in many applications ranging from combustion to biology. We will review some previous mathematical results regarding front propagation in the presence of advection based on homogenization theory and existence of travelling waves for some classes of flows. However, these methods do not provide explicit bounds on the propagation speed in terms of the advecting flow, and are applicable for a limited range of flows. We will introduce an unambiguous way to measure the reaction rate in the situations when these approaches may not work. We will describe bounds on the reaction rate in terms of the magnitude, geometry and scale of oscillations of the advecting flow. In particular this will allow us to estimate the speed of the travelling fronts in shear and vortical flows. |
Mathematical Biology