Book excerpt: Recent developments by the authors in the field of comprehensive detailed chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms for hydrocarbon fuels are reviewed. Examples are given of how these mechanisms provide fundamental chemical insights into a range of combustion applications. Practical combustion consists primarily of chemical heat release from reactions between a fuel and an oxidizer, and computer simulations of practical combustion systems have become an essential tool of combustion research (Westbrook et al., 2005). At the heart of most combustion simulations, the chemical kinetic submodel frequently is the most detailed, complex and computationally costly part of a system model. Historically, the chemical submodel equations are solved using time-implicit numerical algorithms, due to the extreme stiffness of the coupled rate equations, with a computational cost that varies roughly with the cube of the number of chemical species in the model. While early mechanisms (c. 1980) for apparently simple fuels such as methane (Warnatz, 1980) or methanol (Westbrook and Dryer, 1979) included perhaps 25 species, current detailed mechanisms for much larger, more complex fuels such as hexadecane (Fournet et al., 2001; Ristori et al., 2001; Westbrook et al., 2008) or methyl ester methyl decanoate (Herbinet et al., 2008) have as many as 2000 or even 3000 species. Rapid growth in capabilities of modern computers has been an essential feature in this rapid growth in the size and complexity of chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms.