We study reactive front speeds in randomly perturbed cellular flows using a variational representation for the front speed. We develop this representation into a computational tool for computing the front speeds without resorting to closure approximations. We demonstrate that the front speeds depend on flow statistics and topologies in a complex and dramatic manner.

The propagation and interaction in more than one space dimension of localized pulse solutions (so-called light bullets) to the sine-Gordon [SG] equation is studied both asymptotically and numerically. Similar solutions and their resemblance to solitons in integrable systems were observed numerically before in vector Maxwell systems. The simplicity of SG allows us to perform an asymptotic analysis of counterpropagating pulses, as well as a fully resolved computation over rectangular domains. Numerical experiments are carried out on single pulse propagation and on two pulse collision under different orientations. The particle nature, as known for solitons, persists in these two space dimensional solutions as long as the amplitudes of initial data range in a finite interval, similar to the conditions on the vector Maxwell systems.

In this paper, we prove that the celebrated Arnold--Beltrami--Childress (ABC) flow with parameters A=B=C=1, given by $ \dot x =\sin z+\cos y,\ \dot y = \sin x+\cos z,\ \dot z =\sin y + \cos x $, has periodic orbits on (2\pi\mathbb T)^3 with rotation vectors parallel to (1,0,0), (0,1,0), and (0,0,1). Despite ABC flows being studied since the 1960s, this seems to be the first time that existence of nonperturbative periodic orbits has been established for them. The main difficulty here is the lack of a variational structure for these flows, and our proof instead relies on their symmetry properties. As an application of our result, we show that the well-known G-equation model of turbulent combustion with this ABC flow on (2\pi\mathbb T)^3 has a linear (i.e., maximal possible) flame speed enhancement rate as the flow amplitude grows to infinity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an asymptotic flame speed growth law has been established for a

We study the residual diffusion phenomenon in chaotic advection computationally via adaptive orthogonal basis. The chaotic advection is generated by a class of time periodic cellular flows arising in modeling transition to turbulence in Rayleigh-Bnard experiments. The residual diffusion refers to the non-zero effective (homogenized) diffusion in the limit of zero molecular diffusion as a result of chaotic mixing of the streamlines. In this limit, the solutions of the advection-diffusion equation develop sharp gradients, and demand a large number of Fourier modes to resolve, rendering computation expensive. We construct adaptive orthogonal basis (training) with built-in sharp gradient structures from fully resolved spectral solutions at few sampled molecular diffusivities. This is done by taking snapshots of solutions in time, and performing singular value decomposition of the matrix consisting of these

We study a biodegradation model for the time evolution of concentrations of contaminant, nutrient, and bacteria. The bacteria has a natural concentration which will increase when the nutrient reaches the substrate (contaminant). The growth utilizes nutrients and degrades the substrate. Eventually, such a process removes all the substrate and can be described by traveling wave solutions. The model consists of advection-reaction-diffusion equations for the substrate and nutrient concentrations and a rate equation (ODE) for the bacteria concentration. We first show the existence of approximate traveling wave solutions to an elliptically regularized system posed on a finite domain using degree theory and the elliptic maximum principle. To prove that the approximate solutions do not converge to trivial solutions, we construct comparison functions for each component and employ integral identities of the governing