We investigated a nonlinear advection-diffusion-reaction equation for a passive scalar field. The purpose is to understand how the compressibility can affect the front dynamics and the bulk burning rate. We study two classes of flows: periodic shear flow and cellular flow, analyzing the system by varying the extent of compressibility and the reaction rate. We find that the bulk burning rate vf in a shear flow increases with compressibility intensity ?, following the relation ?vf??2. Furthermore, the faster the reaction is, the more important the difference is with respect to the laminar case.

The long standing difficulty in General Relativity of classifying the dynamics of cosmological models, e.g.\ as chaotic, is directly related to the gauge freedom intrinsic to relativistic spacetime theories: in general the invariance under diffeomorphisms makes any analysis of dynamical evolution dependent from the particular choice of time slicing one uses.

The motion of spinning test particles along circular orbits in static vacuum spacetimes belonging to the Weyl class is discussed. Spin alignment and coupling with background parameters in the case of superimposed Weyl fields, corresponding to a single Schwarzschild black hole and single Chazy-Curzon particle as well as to two Schwarzschild black holes and two Chazy-Curzon particles, are studied in detail for standard choices of supplementary conditions. Applications to the gravitomagnetic "clock effect'' are also discussed.

The construction of a radar coordinate system about the world line of an observer is discussed. Radar coordinates for a hyperbolic observer as well as a uniformly rotating observer are described in detail. The utility of the notion of radar distance and the admissibility of radar coordinates are investigated. Our results provide a critical assessment of the physical significance of radar coordinates.

The periastron position advance for geodesic motion in axially symmetric solutions of the Einstein field equations belonging to the Weyl class of vacuum solutions is investigated. Explicit examples corresponding to either static solutions (single Chazy-Curzon, Schwarzschild and a pair of them), or stationary solution (single rotating Chazy-Curzon and Kerr black hole) are discussed. The results are then applied to the case of S2-SgrA$^*$ binary system of which the periastron position advance will be soon measured with a great accuracy.

This paper describes a collocation method for solving numerically a singular integral equation with Cauchy and Volterra operators, associated with a proper constraint condition. The numerical method is based on the transformation of the given integral problem into a hypersingular integral equation and then applying a collocation method to solve the latter equation. Convergence of the resulting method is then discussed, and optimal convergence rates for the collocation and discrete collocation methods are given in suitable weighted Sobolev spaces.

Human blood flow is a multiscale problem: in first approximation, blood is a dense suspension of plasma and deformable red cells. Physiological vessel diameters range from about one to thousands of cell radii. Current computational models either involve a homogeneous fluid and cannot track particulate effects or describe a relatively small number of cells with high resolution but are incapable to reach relevant time and length scales. Our approach is to simplify much further than existing particulate models.

We present the results of our numerical simulations of the Rayleigh-Taylor turbulence, performed using a recently proposed (Sbragaglia et al 2009 J. Fluid Mech. 628 299, Scagliarini et al 2010 Phys. Fluids 22 055101) lattice Boltzmann method that can describe consistently a thermal compressible flow subjected to an external forcing. The method allowed us to study the system in both the nearly Boussinesq regime and the strongly compressible regime. Moreover, we show that when the stratification is important, the presence of the adiabatic gradient causes the arrest of the mixing process.