pyJac: Analytical Jacobian generator for chemical kinetics

Abstract Accurate simulations of combustion phenomena require the use of detailed chemical kinetics in order to capture limit phenomena such as ignition and extinction as well as predict pollutant formation. However, the chemical kinetic models for hydrocarbon fuels of practical interest typically have large numbers of species and reactions and exhibit high levels of mathematical stiffness in the governing differential equations, particularly for larger fuel molecules. In order to integrate the stiff equations governing chemical kinetics, generally reactive-flow simulations rely on implicit algorithms that require frequent Jacobian matrix evaluations. Some in situ and a posteriori computational diagnostics methods also require accurate Jacobian matrices, including computational singular perturbation and chemical explosive mode analysis. Typically, finite differences numerically approximate these, but for larger chemical kinetic models this poses significant computational demands since the number of chemical source term evaluations scales with the square of species count. Furthermore, existing analytical Jacobian tools do not optimize evaluations or support emerging SIMD processors such as GPUs. Here we introduce pyJac , a Python-based open-source program that generates analytical Jacobian matrices for use in chemical kinetics modeling and analysis. In addition to producing the necessary customized source code for evaluating reaction rates (including all modern reaction rate formulations), the chemical source terms, and the Jacobian matrix, pyJac uses an optimized evaluation order to minimize computational and memory operations. As a demonstration, we first establish the correctness of the Jacobian matrices for kinetic models of hydrogen, methane, ethylene, and isopentanol oxidation (number of species ranging 13–360) by showing agreement within 0.001% of matrices obtained via automatic differentiation. We then demonstrate the performance achievable on CPUs and GPUs using pyJac via matrix evaluation timing comparisons; the routines produced by pyJac outperformed first-order finite differences by 3–7.5 times and the existing analytical Jacobian software TChem by 1.1–2.2 times on a single-threaded basis. It is noted that TChem is not thread-safe, while pyJac is easily parallelized, and hence can greatly outperform TChem on multicore CPUs. The Jacobian matrix generator we describe here will be useful for reducing the cost of integrating chemical source terms with implicit algorithms in particular and algorithms that require an accurate Jacobian matrix in general. Furthermore, the open-source release of the program and Python-based implementation will enable wide adoption. Program summary Program Title: pyJac Program Files doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/mmr3z8j2m5.1 Licensing provisions: MIT License Programming language: Python External routines/libraries: required: NumPy ; optional: Cython , Cantera, PyYAML , Adept Nature of problem: Automatic generation of source code to evaluate Jacobian matrices for chemical kinetic models Solution method: Chemical kinetic model interpreted from input file(s), and partial derivatives and necessary supporting functions are written to file based on a theoretical derivation. Additional comments: This paper describes pyJac v1.0.2, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.251144 . Current version and support available at https://github.com/SLACKHA/pyjac/