Hello all,

Happy, though rather belated, Thanksgiving. Hope everyone enjoyed a good meal and time with family.

I was traveling all last week and am just digging myself from underneath work that piled up during my absence. So I apologize for not getting a post up last week.

Recently I discovered a software tool for chemical kinetic modeling. It’s called the Chemical Kinetic Simulator (or CKS) from IBM Almaden research lab. The code has not been updated since mid-1990s, and I probably would not have given it much thought except for an interesting feature of this software.

The authors claim that CKS does not integrate sets of coupled differential equations to predict the time history of a chemical system. Instead the code uses a stochastic algorithm (type of Monte Carlo calculation) to propagate a reaction.  The authors claim that the stochastic method is much faster for stiff systems.

The  question is, if the stochastic method is much faster for solving reactive systems, why are most other software tools (e.g. Cosilab, Chemkin, DARS, FlameMaster, Chemical WorkBench) use solvers that integrate coupled systems of equations instead of using some form of a stochastic algorithm to solve chemically reactive systems?

I am determined to figure it out. In the next week I’ll be doing some research on the two solver methodologies , the CKS code and other related software. If you are dealing with anything that is chemically reacting,  stay tuned!

On the other hand, if you have some information on CKS OR stochastic vs. integrator methadologies that you would like to share with our readers, either comment below or contact me directly: masha@mvpmodeling solutions.com.

I will be sure to give due credit to everyone contributing information!

Best,
Masha

I am trying out another spiffy new way to provide valuable information to you, MVP blog readers. This is a 4 minute slide presentation about two biggest problems that plague the reactive flow modeling efforts in the engineering industry.

Basically, they boil down to two issues:

1) A perfect modeling software does not exist

2) Chemical mechanisms are user input

- Correct mechanisms do not exist

-  An industry standard for mechanism testing does not exist

Interested? Play the video or watch it on youtube if your browser gives you problems. Read more »

In this post I would like to discuss two software tools which, while not as popular as Fluent, STAR-CD or CHEMKIN, can come very handy for some applications. For researchers on a budget, which probably means all of you reading this, these tools are either free, or are much cheaper than their competition. Since there is no such thing as free lunch – there are some downsides to keep in mind, which I’ll review as well. The tools that I would like to discuss here are FlameMaster and DARS, respectively.

Read more »