RePlaChem: A dimensionality reduction library for plasma chemical mechanisms

In this work, we present RePlaChem, a software library for reducing detailed large-scale plasma chemical mechanisms to smaller skeletal ones. The library parses a plasma chemical mechanism in the well-established format compatible with the software ZDPlasKin, runs the reduction algorithm, and generates automatically a skeletal chemical mechanism. This feature allows the seamless implementation of the skeletal chemistry in well-known solvers including ZDPlasKin. In turn, the reduction of the chemistry accelerates otherwise computationally expensive numerical simulations. Furthermore, RePlaChem can be used as an analysis tool to shed light into the underlying reaction physics by identifying the dominant species and associated reactions. In order to validate and demonstrate its capabilities, RePlaChem is used to substantially reduce a large-scale methane-hydrogen plasma chemical mechanism with 77 species and 4404 reactions at various orders with a relatively small loss of accuracy.