This book is dedicated to gas-phase thermal reactions which take place in engines, burners, and industrial reactors for the production of mechanical or thermal energy, for the incineration of pollutants, or for the manufacture of chemicals. It also studies their effect on the environment: fires, explosions, tropospheric pollution, the greenhouse effect, and holes in the ozone layer. After a short reminder of the concepts and laws of thermodynamics, and of chemical and physical kinetics, the book suggests a methodology for the kinetic modelling of these reactions: generation and reduction of reaction mechanisms, estimation of kinetic data of elementary reactions, estimation of the thermodynamic data and transport data of molecules and free radicals, and analysis and validation of mechanisms by comparison of calculated results with the experimental results obtained using laboratory reactors. The models thus generated carry all the information necessary to allow them to be incorporated into computer programs for the calculation of reactors or of the fluid dynamics of reacting gases. Tables of numerical data and a list of computer programs and URLs complete the book.

This book is devoted to Gas-Phase Thermal Reactions (GPTRs), and especially combustion reactions, which take place in engines, burners and industrial chemical reactors to produce mechanical or thermal energy to incinerate pollutants or to manufacture chemical substances, and which play an important part due to the consequences they have on the environment : fires and explosions, tropospheric pollution, greenhouse effect, hole in the stratospheric ozone layer. The design and running of engines, burners, incinerators, industrial reactors, both economical in fuels, raw materials and energy, efficient, safe and clean, as weIl as the scientific evaluation of the causes and the effects of atmospheric pollutions with a view to taking rational environmental decisions, which necessitate an understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of these reactions and an access to models allowing numerical simulations of the phenomena being studied to be carried out. The analysis of the results ofthe simulations then allows an optimal solution to be found to the industrial problem or to extrapolate the natural phenomena.