jth chemical species (in terms of atoms or molecules) and its

For a given set of R chemical reactions between S chemical species, a set of independent reactions can be found by constructing a matrix from the stoichiometric coefficients of the reactions. using Gaussian elimination (and the number of reactions), a triangular matrix with nonzero diagonal elements can he formed. The number of independent reactions is determined from the number of rows with nonzero diagonal elements, i.e., the rank of the matrix (Amundson, 1966).