Reaction Design Debuts Software For Clean Combustion Chemistry Simulation
Detroit, MI - Reaction Design recently announced the release of its newest combustion simulation software tool, CHEMKIN-PRO, for modeling and analyzing combustion efficiency in gasoline, diesel and emerging alternative fuel engines. The CHEMKIN-PRO product reduces the time to develop new engines and fuels by providing simulation results five to 10 times faster than competitive software tools while achieving the most accurate combustion simulation measurements available.
Manufacturers are feeling mounting regulatory and economic pressures to meet increasingly stringent emissions and fuel efficiency standards. In addition, global environmental and natural resource concerns are driving both engine developers and fuel designers to closely examine the impacts of their design decisions on combustion efficiency. CHEMKIN-PRO helps designers achieve their combustion efficiency goals by moving prototyping and testing into a high-performance virtual simulation environment. With CHEMKIN-PRO, designers can now quickly model many different types of petroleum and alternative fuels in different usage scenarios to determine optimal end results.
"With many different fuel and engine options in development or already available, designers need one simulation tool that quickly and accurately predicts the way various fuel mixtures will interact with different engine designs," said Bernie Rosenthal, CEO of Reaction Design. "CHEMKIN-PRO extends the industry-standard CHEMKIN tool family with new innovations that deliver dramatic productivity improvements for combustion modeling – reducing typical simulation cycles from days to hours. With this tool, design teams can quickly examine many combustion alternatives and be certain that their choice will perform as expected in real-world environments."
CHEMKIN-PRO makes use of an innovative high-speed solver engine that cuts the time required for solution convergence by five to 10 times versus previously available combustion simulation codes. These results are visible using a new, interactive visual display, known as the Reaction Path Analyzer, which also shows which reaction paths are dominant and helps designers determine opportunities for mechanism reduction.
Newly equipped with a particle-tracking module, CHEMKIN-PRO can be used to follow particle growth from inception to oxidation to predict number and size statistics. This new tool also features a user-programmable module called Uncertainty Analysis, which allows designers to evaluate how their inputs propagate through a simulation, helping define tolerances and safety margins and increasing the accuracy of the simulation.
The technology on which CHEMKIN-PRO is based was inspired by the accomplishments of the Model Fuels Consortium (MFC). Founded in 2005 by Reaction Design, the MFC and its members share a common agenda: to develop model fuels that are essential to accurate simulation of the complex chemical processes that drive combustion. The MFC's work will continue to drive the productivity gains and cost advantages realized by using computer-based design to address today's most challenging combustion-modeling issues.
CHEMKIN is the de facto standard for solving complex chemical kinetics problems through modeling and enables the automotive and energy industries to integrate Clean Technology into reactor and combustor design and improvement. CHEMKIN consists of rigorous gas-phase and gas-surface chemical kinetics in a variety of reactor models that can be used to represent the specific set of systems of interest. Through modeling, CHEMKIN circumvents increasing cost and environmental challenges, ensuring faster product development, at lower costs and with minimized impact on the environment.
SOURCE: Reaction Design