Igor G. Donskoy

Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The problem of a thermal explosion in a medium with fluctuations in reactivity, which are specified through the distribution function for the activation energy, is formulated. A variational formulation is proposed for the differential equation describing the stationary temperature distribution in such a medium. Using a simple test function, the dependence of the variational functional on the value of the maximum temperature is numerically investigated. The critical conditions for a thermal explosion correspond to the appearance of an inflection point on this curve. Calculations show that an increase in the dispersion of the reactivity distribution the stability of the system decreases due to shift of the apparent activation energy of the chemical reaction.

thermal explosion, inverse variational problem, critical conditions, numerical solution