Addressing the complexity of combustion kinetics: Data management and automatic model validation

The steadily increasing amount of experimental data produced in combustion science allows kinetic modelers to develop more and more accurate detailed mechanisms of hydrocarbon and oxygenated fuels pyrolysis and oxidation, as well as pollutants formation. Nevertheless, it poses a twofold issue: firstly, the management of a growing pool of datasets and related sources needs to be properly structured, in order to ensure reliability and ease its use, also according to recent governmental policies; secondly, it makes the validation step a potential bottleneck in terms of time and reliability, because of its typically manual, and subjective, nature. In this chapter, both of these topics are addressed: needs and recent initiatives undertaken by private and public entities are discussed, and novel frameworks to tackle both issues are presented and briefly validated.