English

Frozen fronts in cellular flows

Pattern Formation and Solitons 2007-07-31 v1

Abstract

We present experiments on the behavior of reaction fronts in ordered and disordered cellular flows with imposed winds. Fronts in a chain of alternating vortices are found to freeze (pin to the separatrix) for a wide range of imposed winds that grows nonlinearly with the characteristic strength of the underlying vorticity. Experiments in spatially-disordered flows demonstrate that freezing of fronts is common to cellular flows; furthermore, it is not dependent on boundary conditions. We therefore anticipate similar pinning in a wide range of cellular flows and front-producing systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0707.4185,
  title  = {Frozen fronts in cellular flows},
  author = {M. E. Schwartz and T. H. Solomon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0707.4185},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T09:02:34.734Z