In the development of engines and vehicles it is nowadays standard practice to use commercially available computing programmes for simulation, not only of the transient reaction of vehicles or of the complete driveshaft, but also of the highly unsteady processes in the combustion chamber of an engine. Normally the source code is not available for these computing programmes and it takes too much time to study the respective specifications, so the users often do not have sufficient knowledge about the physical and chemical contents of the approaches that the programmes are based on. We have often been faced with this fact in talks to employees or in discussions during the presentation of results of simulation. Therefore it is our aim to point out different physical and chemical approaches and to show the possibilities and limits of the models used.
