Development of a Reduced Kinetic Mechanism for Ethanol based on DRG and Sensitivity Analysis.

Abstract

Ethanol is a important fuel that can be produced with renewable energy resources. Based on a mechanism with 377 reactions and 56 species, we combine two methods for mechanism reduction, Directed Relation Graph (DRG) and Sensitivity Analysis, to develop a 34 reactions and 23 species reduced mechanism. DRG is a method that shows the coupling of species through a coefficient based on the reaction rate, while sensitivity analysis uses the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the sensitivity matrix to provide an absolute measure of significance for some species of the mechanism. The main advantage of the mechanism reduction is the decrease of computational cost needed to solve the chemical equations, of one order of magnitude for ethanol.