Combustion models that are used in the simulation of pollutantformation and ignition phenomena and in the study of chemically controlledextinctionlimitsoften combine detailedchemical kineticswith complicated transportphenomena. As the number of chemical speciesand the geometric complexity of the computational domain increases, the modeling of such systems becomes computationally prohibitiveon even the largest
supercomputer. The difficultycentersprimarilyon the number of chemical speciesand on the sizeof the differentlength scalesin the problem. Ifone can reduce the number of species in a reactionnetwork while stillretainingthe predictivecapabilitiesof the mechanism, potentiallylarger problems could be solved with existingtechnology. In addition,currentlargescaleproblems could be moved to smallerworkstationcomputers.