Data-Inspired and Physics-Driven Model Reduction for Dissociation: Application to the O₂ + O System

This work presents an in-depth discussion on the nonequilibrium dissociation of O₂ molecules colliding with O atoms, combining quasi-classical trajectory calculations, master equation, and dimensionality reduction. A rovibrationally resolved database for all of the elementary collisional processes is constructed by including all nine adiabatic electronic states of O₃ in the QCT calculations. A detailed analysis of the ab initio data set reveals that for a rovibrational level, the probability of dissociating is mostly dictated by its deficit in internal energy compared to the centrifugal barrier. Because of the assumption of rotational equilibrium, the conventional vibrational-specific calculations fail to characterize such a dependence. Based on this observation, a new physics-based grouping strategy for application to coarse-grained models is proposed. By relying on a hybrid technique made of rovibrationally resolved excitation coupled to coarse-grained dissociation, the new approach is compared to the vibrational-specific model and the direct solution of the rovibrational state-to-state master equation. Simulations are performed in a zero-dimensional isothermal and isochoric chemical reactor for a wide range of temperatures (1500-20,000 K). The study shows that the main contribution to the model inadequacy of vibrational-specific approaches originates from the incapability of characterizing dissociation, rather than the energy transfers. Even when constructed with only twenty groups, the new reduced-order model outperforms the vibrational-specific one in predicting all of the QoIs related to dissociation kinetics. At the highest temperature, the accuracy in the mole fraction is improved by 2000%.