The Darrieus-Landau instability in fast deflagration and laser ablation

The problem of the Darrieus-Landau instability at a discontinuous deflagration front in a compressible flow is solved. Numerous previous attempts to solve this problem suffered from the deficit of boundary conditions. Here, the required additional boundary condition is derived rigorously taking into account the internal structure of the front. The derived condition implies a constant mass flux at the front; it reduces to the classical Darrieus-Landau condition in the limit of an incompressible flow. It is demonstrated that in general the solution to the problem depends on the type of energy source in the flow. In the common case of a strongly localized source, compression effects make the Darrieus-Landau instability considerably weaker. Particularly, the instability growth rate is reduced for laser ablation in comparison to the classical incompressible case. The instability disappears completely in the Chapman-Jouguet regime of ultimately fast deflagration. (C) 2008 American Institute of Physics.