MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF SUPERCRITICAL MULTICOMPONENT REACTIVE FLUIDS

We investigate a system of partial differential equations modeling supercritical multicomponent reactive fluids. These equations involve nonideal fluid thermodynamics, nonideal chemistry as well as multicomponent diffusion fluxes driven by chemical potential gradients. Only local symmetrization of the resulting system of partial differential equations may be achieved because of thermodynamic instabilities even though the entropy function is globally defined. Local symmetrized forms are explicitly evaluated in terms of the inverse of the chemical potential Hessian and local normal forms lead to global existence and asymptotic stability of equilibrium states as well as decay estimates. We also discuss the deficiency of the resulting system of partial differential equations at thermodynamically unstable states typically associated with nonideal fluids.