SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS IN METHANE-AIR COMBUSTION

We present in this paper a new technique for the analysis of reactions’ mechanism of chemical kinetics.The method is based on the evaluation of species’ sensitivities to elementary reactions’ rate constants. The method was applied for the methane-air combustion mechanism which contains 213 elementary reactions and 48 species.The mathematical model consists of a system of ordinary differential equations. The solution of this system is performed with a computer program using the numerical fourth order Runge-Kutta method.The results illustrate the sensitivities of each species to the 213 elementary reactions. The results show clearly the high sensitivities for each species. The high sensitivities are used to determine which elementary reactions’ rate constants that we must determine in experiments with high accuracy in order to obtain a credible time evolution of species’ concentrations.