6. Outlook

Since the beginning of the 20th century, experimental work on the oxidation and combustion of molecules representative of fossil fuels has led to the construction of a complete scheme explaining the various reaction stages over the entire temperature range, from 450 to over 2500 K. This mechanism, whose complexity varies with temperature, involves numerous intermediate species, both stable and non-stable, to rationalize the formation of the final combustion products.

The purely descriptive approach to combustion soon gave way to a quantitative one, with the aim of reasonably predicting combustion kinetics under conditions that had not been studied or were not experimentally accessible. The development of these kinetic models, aided by the democratization of quantum chemistry, has led to significant advances in the development of heat engines, for example, or in...