A Criticality Criterion for Thermal Explosions in Well-stirred Systems with Reactant Consumption: Addendum

OUR attention has been drawn to the fact that the criticalitycondition ^* = 1 of Adler & Herbert (1985), for well-stirredreactive systems, has been derived previously (Gray, 1975).It arises from an examination of trajectories in the temperaturereactant phase plane when a tube stability argument is employed.Using the criterion ^* = 1, values of the critical Semenov numberhave also been obtained numerically (Gray & Jones, 1981). Our work on criticality for systems with reactant consumptioncame about by trying to reconcile the inflection criterion ofBoddington et al. (1983), for finite B, with the correspondingmaximum criterion in the limit B . Our contribution was to showthat the Semenov number versus maximum temperature ^* curvehas a bifurcation at ^* = 1 for all B. Both Gray's work and ourown are attempting to resolve the same problem; the approachesare, however, quite distinct and complement each other