Experimental designs for the determination of key reactions in photochemical models: Application to the photochemistry of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Titan

Experimental design is known to be a powerful tool that permits to identify the most active factors in an experiment. Many works have shown that this technique can also be applied to the domain of numerical simulation. In the present paper, we show that experimental design-based methods are suitable for sensitivity analysis studies in photochemical models. Such a method is presented and applied to a simple photochemical model of Titan's atmosphere. The key reactions that control the concentration of the main hydrocarbons of the model are identified. Comparison with a global sensitivity method is discussed. We show that experimental design-based methods permit to significantly reduce the number of simulations to identify the key reactions in complex kinetic models.