Transition to Longitudinal Instability of Detonation Waves is Generically Associated with Hopf Bifurcation to Time-Periodic Galloping Solutions

We show that transition to longitudinal instability of strong detonation solutions of reactive compressible Navier–Stokes equations is generically associated with Hopf bifurcation to nearby time-periodic “galloping”, or “pulsating”, solutions, in agreement with physical and numerical observation. In the process, we determine readily numerically verifiable stability and bifurcation conditions in terms of an associated Evans function, and obtain the first complete nonlinear stability result for strong detonations of the reacting Navier–Stokes equations, in the limit as amplitude (hence also heat release) goes to zero. The analysis is by pointwise semigroup techniques introduced by the authors and collaborators in previous works.