Fast chemical reaction and multiple-scale concentration fields in singular vortices.

Two species involved in a simple, fast reaction tend to become segregated in patches composed of a single of these reactants. These patches are separated by a boundary where the stoichiometric condition is satisfied and the reaction occurs, fed by diffusion. Stirred by advection, this boundary and the concentration fields within the patches may tend to present multiple-scale characteristics. Based on this segregated state, this paper aims at evaluating the temporal evolutions of the length of the boundary and diffusive flux of reactants across it, when concentrations presenting initial self-similar fluctuations are advected by a singular vortex. First the two sources of singularity, i.e., the self-similar initial conditions and the singular vortex, are considered separately. On the one hand, self-similar initial conditions are imposed to a diffusion-reaction system, for one- and two-dimensional cases. On the other hand, an imposed singular vortex advects initially on/off concentration fields, in combination with diffusion and reaction. This problem is addressed analytically, by characterizing the boundary by a box-counting dimension and the concentration fields by a Hölder exponent, and numerically, by direct numerical simulations of the advection-diffusion-reaction equations. Second, the way the two sources hang together shows that, depending on the self-similar properties of the initial concentration fields, the vortex promotes the chemical activity close to its inner smoothed-out core or close to the outer region where the boundary starts to spiral. For all the considered situations, the length of the boundary and the global reaction speed are found to evolve algebraically with time after a short transient and a good agreement is found between the analytical and numerical scaling laws.