Influence of random initial conditions on explosive systems

It has been shown that the exothermal and isothermal explosive systems are extremely sensitive to fluctuations of either thermodynamical and environmental origin as well as to the way they are initially prepared. The latter source of variability, manifested through small differences in initial conditions, can deeply affect the transient behavior. Applied to an exothermic explosive model, like the Semenov model, the effects of random initial conditions manifest themselves in a wide dispersion of explosion times. Furthermore, under certain conditions the distribution of explosion times becomes bimodal: the initial set of systems split, with the same probability, into a short explosion time class and a long explosion time class.