A general strategy for analysis and reduction of uncertain chemical kinetic models is presented, and its utility is illustrated in the context of ignition of hydrocarbon fuel–air mixtures. The strategy is based on a deterministic analysis and reduction method which employs computational singular perturbation analysis to generate simplified kinetic mechanisms, starting from a detailed reference mechanism. We model uncertain quantities in the reference mechanism, namely the Arrhenius rate parameters, as random variables with prescribed uncertainty factors. We propagate this uncertainty to obtain the probability of inclusion of each reaction in the simplified mechanism. We propose probabilistic error measures to compare predictions from the uncertain reference and simplified models, based on the comparison of the uncertain dynamics of the state variables, where the mixture entropy is chosen as progress variable. We employ the construction for the simplification of an uncertain mechanism in an n-butane–air mixture homogeneous ignition case, where a 176-species, 1111-reactions detailed kinetic model for the oxidation of n-butane is used with uncertainty factors assigned to each Arrhenius rate pre-exponential coefficient. This illustration is employed to highlight the utility of the construction, and the performance of a family of simplified models produced depending on chosen thresholds on importance and marginal probabilities of the reactions.
Bayesian inference and maximum entropy methods were employed for the estimation of the joint probability density for the Arrhenius rate parameters of the rate coefficient of the H2/O2-mechanism chain branching reaction H + O2 → OH + O. A consensus joint posterior on the parameters was obtained by pooling the posterior parameter densities given each consistent data set. Efficient surrogates for the OH concentration were constructed using a combination of Padé and polynomial approximants. Gauss-Hermite quadrature with Gaussian proposal probability density functions for moment computation were used resulting in orders of magnitude speedup in data likelihood evaluation. The consistent data sets resulted in nearly Gaussian conditional parameter probability density functions. The resulting pooled parameter probability density function was propagated through stoichiometric H2-air auto-ignition computations to illustrate the necessity for correlation among the Arrhenius rate parameters of one reaction and across rate parameters of different reactions to be considered.
The UQ Toolkit (UQTk) is a collection of libraries and tools for the quantification of uncer- tainty in numerical model predictions. Version 3.0 offers intrusive and non-intrusive methods for propagating input uncertainties through computational models, tools for sensitivity anal- ysis, methods for sparse surrogate construction, and Bayesian inference tools for inferring parameters from experimental data. This manual discusses the download and installation process for UQTk, provides pointers to the UQ methods used in the toolkit, and describes some of the examples provided with the toolkit.