Reduced description in the reaction kinetics

Models of complex reactions in thermodynamically isolated systems often demonstrate evolution towards low-dimensional manifolds in the phase space. For this class of models, we suggest a direct method to construct such manifolds, and thereby to reduce the effective dimension of the problem. The approach realizes the invariance principle of the reduced description, it is based on iterations rather than on a small parameter expansion, it leads to tractable linear problems, and is consistent with thermodynamic requirements. The approach is tested with a model of catalytic reaction. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.