Bifurcation of Pulsating and Spinning Reaction Fronts in Condensed Two-Phase Combustion

We employ a nonlinear stability analysis to describe the bifurcation of pulsating and spinning modes of combustion in condensed media. We adopt the two-phase model of Margolis (1983) in which the modified nondimensional activation energy Δ of the reaction is large, but finite, and in which the limiting component of the mixture melts during the reaction process, as characterized by a nondimensional melting parameter M. We identify several types of non-steady solution branches which bifurcate from the steady palanar solution and show that they are supercritical and stable only for certain realistic ranges of M. For example, the spinning modes, though supercritical and stable for a range of M > 0, are subcritical and unstable for M = 0.