Today more than ever, chemists and engineers face the challenge of increasing the efficiency of chemical processes and combustion devices while reducing emissions of pollutants from them. For example, witness the increasingly stringent environmental regulations being applied to internal combustion engines, industrial gas turbines, chemical processing plants, etc.

Simulation is one tool that can be very effective in shaping designs to meet these new challenges. However, such a tool must be able to capture in detail both the chemical kinetics and the complex fluid flows taking place.To meet the challenge of merging complex chemistry with complex fluid flows, CD-adapco has incorporated several new chemistry features in its industry-leading STAR-CD software.

Perhaps the most significant development has been the partnership developed between CD-adapco and Reaction Design, distributors of the widely-used CHEMKIN Collection software. The CHEMKIN Collection provides a computationally efficient means of determining species concen trations accurately for complex coupled chemistry in a variety of idealized chemical reactor situations. By extending their highly developed chemistry solvers to STAR-CD, these same complex surface and gas phase chemistries can now be solved for transient and steady-state problems. These involve complex geometries, as well as a variety of physical phenomena including sprays, radiation, turbulence, buoyancy, etc.

The resulting joint product, STAR-CD/KINetics, combines the CFD and geometry-handling strengths of STAR-CD with components of CHEMKIN's leading-edge technology for treating complex coupled chemical kinetics and molecular transport. A beta version of this software based on the current V3.150 of STAR-CD will soon be available; the full version will be with the next general release of STAR-CD. Several other features are also being added to STAR-CD for V3.200 that will complement the STAR-CD/KINetics package:

- CD-adapco has revamped the transport property module to include an expanded database of temperature-dependent transport properties, including viscosities, thermal conductivities, and diffusivities based on the NASA Glenn polynomial format. In addition, a general purpose interface that allows users to link with their own transport property packages. Of course, with the STAR-CD/KINetics package, users will also have access to the CHEMKIN Collection's latest thermal and transport databases as well.

- To provide a general chemistry capability, the new general-purpose interface will allow users to couple their own chemistry packages to STAR-CD and simulate a wide-range of reaction systems. A reaction decoupler will also be available to allow users to separately solve reactions that have a negligible impact on the flow field or on other reactions from the coupled chemistry-flow solution, thus saving overall computation time.

- In addition to the STAR-CD/KINetics package, CD-adapco has also developed its own suite of gas phase coupled chemistry solvers for transient and steady-state problems.