Examples of the influence of the geometry on the propagation of progressive waves

International audienceIn this paper, we give examples of the influence of the domain of propagation on progressive waves. More precisely, we numerically investigate the propagation of reaction diffusion waves in cylinders with variable radius. We show that, when the radius rapidly expands from a very small radius to a larger one, depending on the viscosity and the nonlinearity, the travelling wave may be blocked. The aim of this paper is to give numerical illustrations and quantifications of this effect, and to propose some conjectures which could be interesting subjects for further mathematical investigations. This work is linked to the study of spreading depression (SD), a propagative mechanism in brain and various tissues which has been observed in vivo and in vitro in many species since their discovery in 1944 by Leao. As a matter of fact, their direct observation in Man is still controversial. The complex structure of gray and white matter in humans may block the propagation of SD over large distances in brain and thus explain the difficulty of observing it. Medical consequences of the current numerical studies are detailed in [M.A. Dronne, et al., Influence of brain geometry on spreading depressions: a computationnal study, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 97 (1) (2008) 54-59] and a first mathematical approach given in [M.A. Dronne, E. Grenier, H. Gilquin, Modelization of spreading depressions following Nedergaard, preprint, 2003]