Chemical Equilibrium Mixture Computations for Energetic Material Combustion in Closed Vessels

A major computational code called CERV was developed to determine complex equilibrium compositions of a nonideal mixture of numerous imperfect gases and compressible liquid and solid species with phase transitions for closed-vessel applications. This code minimizes Gibbs energy using reaction variables, in contrast to other major codes like BRL-Blake, BRCBagheera and NASA-CEA that use composition variables such as mole numbers. The CERV code has significant advantages in handling compressible condensed species with phase transitions and computing nonideal mixture compositions accurately and efficiently. Computations are done robustly, without convergence failures from matrix inversions or iterative procedures, for problems with reaction products consisting of hundreds of gaseous, liquid and solid species.