Adjoint-based sensitivity analysis of quantities of interest of complex combustion models

An adjoint-based approach for the sensitivity analysis of complex reaction mechanisms is presented. It builds purely on the evaluation of the governing equations. No adjoint equations have to be derived explicitly. Instead, the required adjoint operator is constructed numerically. The approach can be utilised for various kinetic models and in existing codes with minimal implementation effort. All dependencies on the state and on model parameters are fully evaluated without simplifications. Sensitivities are calculated more efficiently and more robustly compared with the often-used brute-force method. The approach is demonstrated for a homogeneous (zero-dimensional) reactor with different complex reaction mechanisms including several reaction types.