Reduction of a collisional-radiative mechanism for argon plasma based on principal component analysis

This article considers the development of reduced chemistry models for argon plasmas using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based methods. Starting from an electronic specific Collisional-Radiative model, a reduction of the variable set (i.e., mass fractions and temperatures) is proposed by projecting the full set on a reduced basis made up of its principal components. Thus, the flow governing equations are only solved for the principal components. The proposed approach originates from the combustion community, where Manifold Generated Principal Component Analysis (MG-PCA) has been developed as a successful reduction technique. Applications consider ionizing shock waves in argon. The results obtained show that the use of the MG-PCA technique enables for a substantial reduction of the computational time