OpenSMOKE: numerical modeling of reacting systems with detailed kinetic mechanisms

Appropriate, numerical modeling of combustion systems needs an accurate treatment of the governing complex kinetic mechanisms (which usually grow in size with the complexity of the fuel being modeled). Since the associated computational cost increases with the size (species and reactions) of the kinetic model adopted, the coupling of multi-dimensional simulations and detailed kinetic schemes requires a very high computational effort. Therefore, the development of approaches for improving the computational efficiency in the management of detailed kinetics is today an important area of research. In this paper a collection of open-source, C++ libraries, called OpenSMOKE, specifically conceived to manage large, detailed kinetic schemes (with hundreds of species and thousands of reactions) in numerical simulations of reacting flows, is presented. Some details about its object-oriented nature are presented and the possibility of coupling the OpenSMOKE libraries with existing numerical codes is discussed. Some examples demonstrating the ability of the OpenSMOKE library to successfully manage large kinetic schemes are eventually presented.