Analysis of the computational singular perturbation reduction method for chemical kinetics

This article is concerned with the asymptotic accuracy of the Computational Singular Perturbation (CSP) method developed by Lam and Goussis [The CSP method for simplifying kinetics, Int. J. Chem. Kin. 26 (1994) 461-486] to reduce the dimensionality of a system of chemical kinetics equations. The method, which is generally applicable to multiple-time scale problems arising in a broad array of scientific disciplines, exploits the presence of disparate time scales to model the dynamics by an evolution equation on a lower-dimensional slow manifold. In this article it is shown that the successive applications of the CSP algorithm generate, order by order, the asymptotic expansion of a slow manifold. The results are illustrated on the Michaelis-Menten-Henri equations of enzyme kinetics.