Enhancement of combustion by drift in a coupled reaction-diffusion model

Abstract

We study analytically and numerically a model describing front propagation of a KPP reaction in a fluid flow. The model consists of coupled one-dimensional reaction-diffusion equations with different drift coefficients. The main rigorous results give lower bounds for the speed of propagation that are linear in the drift coefficient, which agrees very well with the numerical observations. In addition, we find the optimal constant in a functional inequality of independent interest used in the proof.