Reduction of reaction mechanisms in plasma chemistry

Summary form only given. When studying the chemically active plasmas by the methods of computational physics, the macroscopic kinetic approach proved to be very convenient. The models are based on the systems of chemical reactions between active species in the discharge, from which the continuity equations for concentrations of individual species are derived. However, in many cases the kinetic scheme of the model is very complicated and the set of input chemical reactions must be reduced first in order to be able to solve the model. Various techniques for model simplification can be found in the literature - e.g. approaches based on the sensitivities of individual reactions, on the corresponding reaction rates, on time-scale separation, etc. The technique used in our contribution is based on the monitoring of the speed of every reaction during the kinetic calculations, resulting in weight factors of reactions describing the relative importance of individual reactions in kinetic scheme¹. The main goal is to preserve only the reactions influencing profoundly the resulting concentrations of main products or products important for given application.