December 22, 2011 Journal article Open Access

Front propagation in Rayleigh-Taylor systems with reaction

Mauro Sbragaglia; Luca Biferale; Luca Biferale; Filippo Mantovani; Raffaele Tripiccione; Marcello Pivanti; Fabio Pozzati; Sebastiano Fabio Schifano; Federico Toschi; Andrea Scagliarini

A special feature of Rayleigh-Taylor systems with chemical reactions is the competition between turbulent mixing and the "burning processes", which leads to a highly non-trivial dynamics. We studied the problem performing high resolution numerical simulations of a 2d system, using a thermal lattice Boltzmann (LB) model. We spanned the various regimes emerging at changing the relative chemical/turbulent time scales, from slow to fast reaction; in the former case we found numerical evidence of an enhancement of the front propagation speed (with respect to the laminar case), providing a phenomenological argument to explain the observed behaviour. When the reaction is very fast, instead, the formation of sharp fronts separating patches of pure phases, leads to an increase of intermittency in the small scale statistics of the temperature field.