Continuation tools as a virtual test bench for chemical reaction mechanisms

This contribution presents recent research activities on the numerical continuation methods for the analysis of chemical reaction mechanisms. The building of bifurcation maps represents an effective way to investigate the behavior of complex fuels (represented by the associated chemical mechanism) in a wide range of operative conditions. Unfortunately, with the increasing of the number of species and reactions, the number of governing equations and the complexity of generation term increase. Consequently, the continuation packages available become not able to deal with the resulting computational complexity. This presentation will illustrate some recently introduced numerical approaches. Pros and contras of each one will be discussed in view of the potential implementation into an automatic platform.