3. Reaction mechanisms

There are three main ways of creating a reaction mechanism to account for experimental results, and they can complement each other:

• elementary reactions from the literature involving species present or likely to be present in the reaction medium are collected;

• we draw up an a priori list of the species present or likely to be present in the reaction medium, and systematically consider the monomolecular and then bimolecular reactions of these species. A convenient way of doing this is to use a matrix representation [31] ;

• we define a list of generic reactions and systematically apply them to the reactants. The result is a primary mechanism. A number of primary products are then selected, and the generic reactions...