Chaotic oscillations on arrays of iron electrodes

Experiments have been carried out with arrays of iron electrodes in sulfuric acid. The arrays can be used to study surface patterns since the currents of the individual electrodes in the array, as well as the total current, are measured. Most of the experiments were done with an impinging jet system at a constant potential, under which conditions high-frequency periodic and chaotic oscillations occur. It was seen that the complexity of the oscillations increased as the system size (the number of electrodes in the arrays) increased; oscillations changed from period 1 to period 2 to a simple chaos and then to a more complex chaos. This increase in complexity is similar to that found in earlier work in which the size of single electrodes was increased. In the case of low-dimensional chaos on the arrays, the overall dimension (that of the total current) was the same as the local dimensions (those of the individual electrodes); the overall dimension appears to be higher than the local dimensions with more complex chaos. The experiments are done under conditions under which the coupling between electrodes whose spacing was that of the greatest distance in the largest array is not strong enough to synchronize periodic oscillations.