VULCAN: an Open-Source, Validated Chemical Kinetics Python Code for Exoplanetary Atmospheres

Understand

We present an open-source and validated chemical kinetics code for studying hot exoplanetary atmospheres, which we name VULCAN.

• It is constructed for gaseous chemistry from 500 to 2500 K using a reduced C-H-O chemical network with about 300 reactions.
• It uses eddy diffusion to mimic atmospheric dynamics and excludes photochemistry.
• We have provided a full description of the rate coefficients and thermodynamic data used.