KINAL

KINAL is the ancestor of KINALC, a program package for the simulation and analysis of general mass action kinetics reaction mechanisms. KINAL includes a program for the solution of stiff ODEs and another program for the calculation of concentration sensitivities. There are programs in it for the principal component analysis of the sensitivity matrices, for rate-of-production analysis, for the calculation of species lifetimes, and for the detection of redundant species in mechanisms.

 Download KINAL documentation KINAL documentation (ASCII text file, 30 kbyte)  

Download the whole KINAL package (176 kbyte)

This uuencoded file contains the 43 files of the KINAL package. 
The files were packed together with 'tar', compressed with 'compress', 
and then uuencoded. Accordingly, they can be extracted by:

uudecode <kinal.uue (gives kinaltar.Z)
uncompress kinaltar.Z (gives kinaltar)
tar -xvf kinaltar

or you may prefer to 

download the member programs of KINAL

  DIFFDAT: Automated preparation of DIFF datafiles.

 DIFFDAT.exe (binary executable file for PCs, 56 kbyte)

  DIFFDAT.bas (QuickBasic file, ASCII, 19 kbyte)

  DIFF: solution of stiff kinetic models

  DIFF.f DIFF.f: a FORTRAN program (ASCII, 25 k byte)

 DTEST.dat DTEST.dat sample data file (ASCII, 1 kbyte)

 RED.dat auxiliary data file for testing reduced mechanisms (ASCII, 2 kbyte)

 SENS local sensitivity analysis of mass-action kinetic models

 SENS.f FORTRAN program (ASCII, 38 kbyte)

 STEST.dat sample data file (ASCII, 2 kbyte)

 PROC: kinetic analysis based on the solution (DIFF) or the sensitivity results (SENS)

 PROC.f FORTRAN program (ASCII, 33 k byte)

 PTEST.dat sample data file (ASCII, 2 kbyte)

 ROPA: rate-of-production analysis of kinetic systems

 ROPA.f FORTRAN program (ASCII, 23 kbyte)

 RTEST.dat RTEST.dat sample data file (ASCII, 1 kbyte)

 YRED: elimination of redundant variables from kinetic models

 YRED.f FORTRAN program (ASCII, 20 kbyte)

 YTEST.dat sample data file (ASCII, 1 kbyte)

 Sample output file from all member-programs

          output file (ASCII, 12 kbyte)

Comparison of KINALC and KINAL

Why is KINALC better than KINAL?

- KINALC has been designed to be very user friendly. It accepts simple keywords and can provide a detailed explanation of the results. KINAL requires numerical codes instead of keywords and the mechanism had to be coded as well. However, an interactive utility program is available to help coding KINAL input files.

- KINALC includes several options which are not present in KINAL. These new features are: the listing of species sensitivities, the identification of rate limiting steps, the calculation of element fluxes and the calculation of QSSA error.

- Several advanced application programs based on the CHEMKIN package are available. These programs incorporate a huge amount of knowledge in physics and numerical mathematics. You can use these programs with KINALC but not with KINAL.

- The mechanism handling of CHEMKIN, also used by KINALC, is very good at dealing with things which are common in combustion mechanisms, like description of the temperature dependence with three parameters and sophisticated handling of pressure dependent and weighted third body reactions. Such features are not directly available in KINAL and therefore application of KINAL to the study of combustion systems requires an extensive modification of the code.

- KINALC was developed in 1994-95 on UNIX workstations and this environment allowed for making a more efficient code. KINAL was developed in 1988-90 on a 286 AT using the MS Fortran 4.0 compiler. This hardware and software implied several limitations, for instance the size of a single array had to be smaller than 64K, and thus did not allow e.g. dynamical usage of arrays.

Why is KINAL better than KINALC?

Although the application of KINALC is generally to be preferred to the old KINAL, the latter still has advantages in some situations.

- Using CHEMKIN as a basis for handling mechanisms implies many possibilities and some limitations. Unlike in CHEMKIN, in KINAL the number of reactants and products is not limited in each reaction step. KINAL accepts reactions without mass balance and allows the application of lumped reaction steps. Also, KINAL does not require thermodynamical data for each species. Unlike KINALC, KINAL can be used for the analysis of lumped atmospheric chemical mechanisms and liquid phase reaction mechanisms.

- KINAL can calculate initial concentration sensitivities. None of the CHEMKIN application programs we have come across offer such a feature.

- KINAL is a complete package with its own simulation program. It might be handier for solving smaller tasks and for educational purposes.

- KINAL gives more freedom to the user for playing with the methods. Having worked for several years with KINAL, the most useful selection of parameters was encoded in KINALC.

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