Large-scale simulations of buoyancy-driven turbulent nuclear burning

An critical uncertainty in modeling thermonuclear supernovae is the degree of enhancement of the burning rate by turbulence during the subsonic burning (deflagration) phase. As turbulent combustion in the laboratory is still an active area of research, this remains a challenging problem. A unique feature of turbulent combustion in supernovae is that the driving of the turbulence arises from the strong buoyancy of the burned material. We discuss the large-scale fully three dimensional studies under way. These studies have the goals of characterizing the essential length scales of flame surface structure and thereby developing specific requirements that models of small-scale structure must meet. We discuss some preliminary results of our study concerning the scale-dependence of flame surface structure