Speed of spreading fronts of the reaction diffusion equation with Stefan boundary conditions

We establish an integral variational principle for the spreading speed of the one dimensional reaction diffusion equation with Stefan boundary conditions, for arbitrary reaction terms. This principle allows to obtain in a simple way the dependence of the speed on the Stefan constant. As an application a generalized Zeldovich-Frank-Kamenetskii lower bound for the speed, valid for monostable and combustion reaction terms, is given.