Dynamic mode decomposition is applied to study the self-excited fluctuations supported by transversely unstable detonations. The focus of this study is on the stability of the limit cycle solutions and their response to forcing. Floquet analysis of the unforced conditions reveals that the least stable perturbations are almost subharmonic with ratio between global mode and fundamental frequency λ i /ω f = 0.47. This suggests the emergence of period doubling modes as the route to chaos observed in larger systems. The response to forcing is analyzed in terms of the coherency of the four fundamental energy modes: acoustic, entropic, kinetic, and chemical. Results of the modal decomposition suggest that the self-excited oscillations are quite insensitive to vortical forcing, and maintain their coherency up to a forcing turbulent Mach number of 0.3. C 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx. Massa, Kumar, and Ravindran Phys. Fluids 24, 066101 (2012) and isotropic) for incompressible turbulence. Previous work on canonical detonation-turbulence interaction 6 focused on flow statistics and showed that the fundamental difference between the shock and detonation problems is the presence of a self-excited unstable region in the detonation post-shock, which supports intrinsic time scales (natural frequencies). The nonlinear modes of the detonation are investigated by applying a novel dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) approach developed by Schmid. 7 DMD is used to extract dynamic information from a sequence of snapshots of the flow field, which is projected onto a lower dimensional Krylov subspace to determine the eigenvalues and the corresponding eigenvectors. Among these, the most dominant are identified and analyzed. Demonstrations of this method are presented in Ref. 7 for a plane channel flow, flow over a two-dimensional cavity, and wake flow behind a flexible membrane passing between two cylinders. More recently, DMD technique has been successfully used to extract linear eigenmodes associated with acoustic pressure data obtained from an electrically heated horizontal Rijke tube. 8 The application of DMD to detonation waves and the decomposition of the energy modes into acoustic, entropic, kinetic, and chemical features is an original contribution of the present work.The remaining portion of this paper is divided in three parts. The method used to solve the flow field is detailed in Sec. II, the analysis of the results is presented in Sec. III, and the concluding remarks are given in Sec. IV.
II. METHOD
A. Governing equations