Chemical kinetic functional sensitivity analysis: Derived sensitivities and general applications

This paper considers possible applications of sensitivity analysis to kinetics problems defined in the space–time domain. At the outset it is assumed that elementary sensitivity functional densities δui/δαj are available, where ui is the ith chemical species concentration and αj is the jth system parameter function. Emphasis is placed on the use of functional calculus to manipulate the elementary sensitivities for addressing a variety of physical questions. In this fashion, a family of derived sensitivities are generated from the elementary set. An extensive list of sensitivity applications is presented along with a discussion as an aid to future work.