We study the two main types of trajectories of the ABC flow in the near-integrable regime: spiral orbits and edge orbits. The former are helical orbits which are perturbations of similar orbits that exist in the integrable regime, while the latter exist only in the nonintegrable regime. We prove existence of ballistic (i.e., linearly growing) spiral orbits by using the contraction mapping principle in the Hamiltonian formulation, and we also find and analyze ballistic edge orbits. We discuss the relationship of existence of these orbits with questions concerning front propagation in the presence of flows, in particular the question of linear (i.e., maximal possible) front speed enhancement rate for ABC flows.

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

The formation and propagation of thermal fronts in a cylindrical medium that is undergoing microwave heating is studied in detail. The model consists of Maxwell's wave equation coupled to a temperature diffusion equation containing a bistable nonlinear term.

We study wetting front (traveling wave) solutions to the Richards equation that describe the vertical infiltration of water through one-dimensional periodically layered unsaturated soils. We prove the existence, uniqueness, and large time asymptotic stability of the traveling wave solutions under prescribed flux boundary conditions and certain constitutive conditions. The traveling waves are connections between two steady state solutions that form near the ground surface and towards the underground water table. We found a closed form expression of the wave speed. The speed of a traveling wave is equal to the ratio of the flux difference and the difference of the spatial averages of the two steady states. We give both analytical and numerical examples showing that the wave speeds in the periodic soils can be larger or smaller than those in the homogeneous soils which have the same mean diffusivity and conductivity

Speed ensemble of bistable (combustion) fronts in mean zero stationary Gaussian shear flows inside two and three dimensional channels is studied with a min-max variational principle. In the small root mean square regime of shear flows, a new class of multi-scale test functions are found to yield speed asymptotics. The quadratic speed enhancement law holds with probability arbitrarily close to one under the almost sure continuity (dimension two) and mean square Hlder regularity (dimension three) of the shear flows. Remarks are made on the quadratic and linear laws of front speed expectation in the small and large root mean square regimes.