Entropy-Related Extremum Principles for Model Reduction of Dissipative Dynamical Systems

Chemical kinetic systems are modeled by dissipative ordinary differential equations involving multiple time scales. These lead to a phase flow generating anisotropic volume contraction. Kinetic model reduction methods generally exploit time scale separation into fast and slow modes, which leads to the occurrence of low-dimensional slow invariant manifolds. The aim of this paper is to review and discuss a computational optimization approach for the numerical approximation of slow attracting manifolds based on entropy-related and geometric extremum principles for reaction trajectories.