CONTROLLING SPATIOTEMPORAL PATTERNS ON A CATALYTIC WAFER

A video-feedback control experiment which successfully suppresses chaotic temporal fluctuations of thermal patterns on a catalytic wafer is reported. A Karhunen-Loeve scheme is used to identify the dominant spatial structures from video imaging and estimate the low-dimensional temporal dynamics. The projected dynamics shows that the spatiotemporal chaos is due to an intermittent chaotic attractor near a homoclinic orbit. The control strategy is then simply to stabilize the hyperbolic fixed point attached to the homoclinic orbit with a local model feedback control.