Glossary

• Adiabatic flame temperature — The temperature combustion gas would reach if none of the heat released escaped to the surroundings.
• Adiabatic mixing — Finding the composition, temperature and flow of streams mixed together without exchanging heat with the surroundings.
• Air ratio — How many times the minimum (stoichiometric) amount of air is actually supplied to burn the fuel.
• Solver results and cached results — A “solver result” was solved for your request; a “cached result” is a stored solver result for exactly the same conditions. Neither is an estimate.
• Calculation fingerprint — A “fingerprint” of a calculation, made from everything that determines its result: inputs, model, mechanism, solver settings and software versions.
• Cantera — Widely used open-source software for chemical equilibrium, thermodynamics, kinetics and reactor calculations. Laplaxian's chemistry runs on it.
• Chemical equilibrium — The state a reacting gas reaches when reactions have gone as far as they can and the composition no longer changes.
• Composition (mole and mass fractions) — Which species a gas contains and how much of each — as a share of molecules (mole fraction X) or of mass (mass fraction Y).
• Enthalpy — The energy carried by a flowing gas — both the part due to temperature and the part stored in chemical bonds.
• Equivalence ratio — How the actual fuel-to-air ratio compares with the stoichiometric ratio — the one that burns all fuel with exactly the oxygen available.
• Heat duty — The heat added to (or removed from) a gas stream per second, in watts.
• Mass flow rate — The mass of gas flowing per second (kg/s).
• Plug flow reactor (PFR) — A model reactor in which gas moves along a tube like a plug, reacting as it goes, without mixing forwards or backwards.
• Pressure — How hard a gas pushes on its surroundings. Laplaxian works with absolute pressure, in pascal (Pa).
• Reaction mechanism — A dataset listing the chemical species involved, their thermodynamic data, and the reactions between them with their rates.
• Residence time — How long the gas stays inside a reactor — the time available for reactions.
• Solver settings — Settings that control how finely and how accurately the numerical solver works. The defaults are fine for most uses.
• Temperature — How hot a gas is. Laplaxian calculates with absolute temperature, in kelvin (K).