RePlaChem: A dimensionality reduction library for plasma chemical mechanisms

TL;DR

RePlaChem is a software library that simplifies large plasma chemical mechanisms into smaller, computationally efficient skeletal models, facilitating faster simulations and better understanding of reaction physics.

Contribution

It introduces an automated reduction tool for plasma chemistry mechanisms compatible with existing solvers, enhancing simulation speed and analytical insight.

Findings

Successfully reduced a 77-species, 4404-reaction mechanism with minimal accuracy loss.

Accelerated plasma simulation processes significantly.

Provided insights into dominant reactions and species in plasma chemistry.

Abstract

In this work, we present RePlaChem, a software library for reducing detailed large-scale plasma chemical mechanisms to smaller skeletal ones. The library parses a plasma chemical mechanism in the well-established format compatible with the software ZDPlasKin, runs the reduction algorithm, and generates automatically a skeletal chemical mechanism. This feature allows the seamless implementation of the skeletal chemistry in well-known solvers including ZDPlasKin. In turn, the reduction of the chemistry accelerates otherwise computationally expensive numerical simulations. Furthermore, RePlaChem can be used as an analysis tool to shed light into the underlying reaction physics by identifying the dominant species and associated reactions. In order to validate and demonstrate its capabilities, RePlaChem is used to substantially reduce a large-scale methane-hydrogen plasma chemical mechanism with 77 species and 4404 reactions at various orders with a relatively small loss of accuracy. GitHub: https: // github. com/ znikolaou/ RePlaChem. git