Pivotal condensation and chemical balancing

Abstract

I present a universal method, called pivotal condensation, for calculating stoichiometric factors of chemical reactions. It can be done by hand, even for rather complicated reactions. The main trick, which I call kernel pivotal condensation (ker pc), to calculate the kernel of a matrix might be of independent interest. The discussion is elaborated for matrices with entries in a principal ideal domain $R$. The ker pc calculates a basis with coefficients in $R$ for the kernel of a matrix, seen as e $Q$-vector space, where $Q$ is the quotient field of $R$. If $W$ is a free saturated $R$-submodule of $R^n$ I address the question how to modify an $R$-basis of the $Q$-vector subspace $Q\otimes _R W$ over the quotient field $Q$ to obtain a basis of the $R$-module $W$. I also indicate how one can solve inhomogeneous linear systems, invert matrices and determine the four subspaces using pivotal condensation. I formulate the balancing by inspection method that is widely used to reduce the size of a linear system arising in chemical balancing in mathematical language.