Active subspace-based dimension reduction for chemical kinetics applications with epistemic uncertainty

Abstract

We focus on an efficient approach for quantification of uncertainty in complex chemical reaction networks with a large number of uncertain parameters and input conditions. Parameter dimension reduction is accomplished by computing an active subspace that predominantly captures the variability in the quantity of interest (QoI). In the present work, we compute the active subspace for a H2/O2 mechanism that involves 19 chemical reactions, using an efficient iterative strategy. The active subspace is first computed for a 19-parameter problem wherein only the uncertainty in the pre-exponents of the individual reaction rates is considered. This is followed by the analysis of a 36-dimensional case wherein the activation energies and initial conditions are also considered uncertain. In both cases, a 1-dimensional active subspace is observed to capture the uncertainty in the QoI, which indicates enormous potential for efficient statistical analysis of complex chemical systems. In addition, we explore links between active subspaces and global sensitivity analysis, and exploit these links for identification of key contributors to the variability in the model response.