https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06192-5
Regular Article
Physics of the transition to detonation of gaseous flames
CNRS, Centrale Marseille, IRPHE UMR7342, Aix Marseille Université, 13384, Marseille, France
Received:
17
December
2024
Accepted:
4
March
2025
Published online:
28
March
2025
The deflagration-to-detonation transition of a self-accelerating flame brush in a closed channel is produced by the local explosion of a tiny kernel of unburned gas on a laminar element of the flame front. This unexplained explosion was analyzed recently by a series of asymptotic analyses. Originally identified on the tip of a laminar elongated flame in tubes of small radius, the explosion mechanism is extended here to self-turbulent flames, to hot spots in the boundary layers and also on cellular flames expanding in free space. The mechanism is presented here to physics-oriented readers, skipping technical details of the theoretical developments. The runaway of the local temperature and pressure is due to the coupling of the inner flame structure with the acceleration-induced downstream-running pressure waves in the external flows. This leads to a dynamical saddle-node bifurcation whose critical condition is in good agreement with experiments.
This article is written to honor the memory of Etienne Guyon. Etienne was fascinated by the combustion phenomena. When I started working on flame theory around 1975, he recommended me to read Gaston Bachelard La psychanalyse du feu. Shortly before he passed away, Etienne gave me a touching phone call. He reminded me of a nice winter evening a long time ago, seating together around my home fire place with his son Antoine and my friend Forman Williams. Forman explained the different colors of flames to the young boy who died tragically the following year. During his last phone call Etienne told me that he would like to write with me another article on flames for non-specialists, following our 1978 paper in La Recherche. I suggested that the topic could be the mechanism of the fascinating phenomenon of deflagration-to-detonation transition that was recently deciphered, 150 years after its first observation in laboratory experiments. The present paper is what I would have liked so very much to discuss with him. Sadly, the time left was too short.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
