CHEMSODE: a stiff ODE solver for the equations of chemical kinetics

Abstract

The ODEs describing a chemical kinetics system can be very stiff and are the most computationally costly part of most reactive flow simulations. Research areas ranging from combustion to climate modeling are often limited by their ability to solve these chemical ODE systems both accurately and efficiently. These problems are commonly treated with an implicit numerical method due to the stiffness that is usually present. The implicit solution technique introduces a large amount of computational overhead necessary to solve the nonlinear algebraic system derived from the implicit time-stepping method. In this paper, a code is presented that avoids much of the usual overhead by preconditioning the implicit method with an iterative technique. This results in a class of time-stepping method that is explicit and very stable for chemical kinetics problems.