| Large-scale simulations of supernovae of Type Ia, which are essential for the ultimate understanding of the supernovae mechanism, need flame physics input at three stages: Ignition and early flame propagation, Large scale burning in a turbulent medium, and a transition to detonation, should one occur.; The current state of the art in multidimensional calculations is to ignore the first point by simply imposing some already-ignited regions in the domain, and to treat large-scale burning by using a flame speed model which is based on scaling arguments. Very little rigorous work has been done on the third point, on discovering an astrophysically relevant mechanism for deflagration-to-detonation transitions (DDT). The state of terrestrial flame-turbulence research is greatly more sophisticated than the current astrophysical corpus, and we would like to begin placing astrophysical combustion research on the same rigorous footing as terrestrial combustion research.; One aspect of our investigation of flame physics has been to examine the behavior of well-known flame instabilities such as Landau-Darrieus in the context of astrophysical flames and degenerate matter. These instabilities can distort and wrinkle the flame surface, increasing the amount of burning and thus the rate of energy input. |
