Reaction Design scientists have worked on mechanism development and reduction projects for a variety of industrial customers. We have worked on numerous CVD and plasma processes, as well as a variety of combustion modeling and chemical manufacturing applications.

A detailed reaction mechanism is an important part of an accurate chemically-reacting-flow model. For many combustion systems, detailed mechanisms are available and can be downloaded from websites listed on our data links page. For other systems, however, reaction mechanisms are not readily available or require development.

Reaction Design's chemists and engineers have access to many published mechanisms (and unpublished data), in addition to extensive experience in applying them to different processes. Even when information exists in the open literature, identifying and assembling the relevant data from a variety of sources, reconciling discrepant values, and extrapolating to different operating conditions can be a difficult process without expert help. Also, rate constants or thermochemical data are often not available in the literature, such that other methods, including computational chemistry techniques or group-additivity methods, must be used to obtain needed parameters.

In addition to developing reaction mechanisms, an increasingly common need is for the systematic reduction of detailed mechanisms to a size that can be used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software with a reacting flow capability, for example, the CHEMKIN-CFD module. Reducing the chemistry from as many as several hundreds of species to thirty or fewer, while retaining good accuracy for key performance indicators, is a skilled task requiring both chemical insight and advanced numerical techniques.

Request more information on Reaction Design's chemical mechanism services.