NASA published a technical brief on 21 August 2026 describing the modernisation of its Chemical Equilibrium with Applications (CEA) code, a tool used for equilibrium chemistry, rocket performance, shock and detonation calculations. The agency said the update, CEA v3, rebuilt the legacy CEA2 Fortran code — released in 2002 — as a Fortran 2008, object-oriented package. It retains a legacy command-line interface while adding Fortran, C, Python, MATLAB and Excel support.

The thermodynamic database was expanded to cover additional propellants and fuels, including green propellant constituents such as ADN, HAN and LMP-103S and sustainable aviation fuel candidates such as n-Butanol. NASA said single equilibrium calculations were, in representative testing, approximately 40 percent slower than CEA2, an absolute difference of about 0.004 seconds per case, while a benchmark sweep of 108,500 cases completed in approximately 1.11 seconds versus approximately 15 minutes with CEA2.

The agency advised engineering users to retain review and validation when moving established CEA2 workflows to CEA v3, particularly for mission-critical analyses.