Shear-flow suppression of hotspot growth

We consider the role of fluid shear in maintaining anomalous “hotspot” solutions reported for a chaotically stirred bistable chemical reaction model [S.M. Cox, Persistent localized states for a chaotically mixed bistable reaction, Phys. Rev. E 74 (2006) 056206]. In the well-mixed regime, the chemical concentration is governed by a single autonomous ordinary differential equation with two stable equilibria. Whether the reaction goes to extinction or to an excited state depends on whether the initial concentration lies below or above some unstable threshold. By contrast, when the concentration varies spatially, and the chemical is stirred, the interplay between advection, diffusion and reaction is much more complicated, and the fate of the reaction depends sensitively on the initial conditions. It has previously been shown that, if the stirring is temporally periodic, a localised hotspot may form, and so the system never becomes fully extinct, nor fully excited. In this work, we first demonstrate that hotspots are in some sense generic, in that they are easily found by trial and error, by choosing reaction parameter values between those giving rise to global extinct and excited states. We also show that hotspots may be associated with hyperbolic, elliptic or even parabolic orbits associated with the underlying stirring. We observe that fluid shear is an important mechanism in localising a hotspot, and derive a reduced ordinary differential equation model which can predict the fate of a chemical stripe in a shear flow accurately.

Research highlights
► We model a bistable chaotically stirred chemical reaction.
► Localised hotspot solutions are located numerically.
► Fluid shear is shown to be important in maintaining hotspots.
► A dynamical system is derived for describing the reaction under shear.
► The dynamical system agrees well with full numerical simulations.