CONFIRMATION OF HIGH FLOW-RATE CHAOS IN THE BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKY REACTION

Past experiments and simulations on the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction clearly demonstrated the existence of chaos in stirred flow reactors at low flow rates. However, the existence of chaos at high flow rates has remained the subject of controversy. The controversy is resolved by the present experiments at high flow rates, which accurately reproduce the complex sequence of periodic, complex periodic, and chaotic states observed by Hudson and co-workers (Hudson et al., 1979; Hudson and Mankin, 1981); the flow rates observed here for the different dynamical regimes agree with those of Hudson et al. within a few percent. This striking reproducibility of the complex periodic and chaotic dynamics is found to be insensitive to stirring rate, size of the reactor, purity of the reagents, temperature, and type of pumping (peristaltic or piston pumps, premixed or nonpremixed feeds). Moreover, the observed sequence is reproduced qualitatively by a four-variable model of the BZ reaction. Thus, this work provides definitive evidence for the existence of deterministic chaos in the BZ reaction at high flow rates. We conclude that past descriptions of aperiodic behavior at high flow rates in terms of various stochastic mechanisms, including incomplete mixing or switching between adjacent periodic states, are inappropriate for the conditions of the Hudson's experiments.