Combustion Thermodynamics and Dynamics

Book excerpt: Combustion Thermodynamics and Dynamics builds on a foundation of thermal science, chemistry, and applied mathematics that will be familiar to most undergraduate aerospace, mechanical, and chemical engineers to give a first-year graduate-level exposition of the thermodynamics, physical chemistry, and dynamics of advection-reaction-diffusion. Special effort is made to link notions of time-independent classical thermodynamics with time-dependent reactive fluid dynamics. In particular, concepts of classical thermochemical equilibrium and stability are discussed in the context of modern nonlinear dynamical systems theory. The first half focuses on time-dependent spatially homogeneous reaction, while the second half considers effects of spatially inhomogeneous advection and diffusion on the reaction dynamics. Attention is focused on systems with realistic detailed chemical kinetics as well as simplified kinetics. Many mathematical details are presented, and several quantitative examples are given. Topics include foundations of thermochemistry, reduced kinetics, reactive Navier–Stokes equations, reaction-diffusion systems, laminar flame, oscillatory combustion, and detonation.