Combustion Institute selects Matalon paper 'Distinguished Paper' at international symposium

Professor Matalon’s paper Strain Rates Effects on the Nonlinear Development of Hydrodynamically Unstable Flames was selected as the Distinguished Paper in the Laminar Flames colloquium of the 33rd International Symposium on Combustion held in August 2010 in Beijing. The biennial symposia are the highlights of the Combustion Institute activities and draw a large number of participants from all over the world. Publication in the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, which enjoys an Impact Factor of 3.256 (based on 2009 data), is rather prestigious; papers are vigorously reviewed and less than 40% of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation and publication.

The aforementioned paper is based on joint work with Dr. Francesco Creta, a postdoctoral Fellow under Professor Matalon’s supervision. It describes the ultimate structure that evolves when a planar flame becomes unstable due to the ever-existing background disturbances. In seminal papers, published over 60 years ago, Darrieus and Landau discovered independently that, as a result of the substantial gas expansion that results from the heat released during combustion, a planar flame configuration is unconditionally unstable. The implication at the time was that the instability leads to turbulence. The present results, supported by experimental evidence, show that the hydrodynamic instability leads to large corrugated structures (see figure) that propagate steadily at a speed much larger than the laminar flame speed (the speed of a planar adiabatic flame). Novel aspects of the present study include accounting systematically for the large density variations that are observed in real flames, and identifying, in particular, the role of hydrodynamic strain in sustaining the corrugated structure (the large surface velocity gradients are evident in the figure).

Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, Vol. 33, Issue 1, 2011, pp 1087-1094. DOI: 10.1016/j.proci.2010.06.029