Spatiotemporal patterns and diffusion-induced chaos in a chemical system with equal diffusion coefficients

Abstract We report on numerical evidence for the existence of non-trivial spatiotemporal patterns in a one-dimensional reaction-diffusion chemical system with equal diffusion coefficients. When imposing a concentration gradient through the system, one mimics the stationary and periodically oscillating spatial structures observed in a recent experiment conducted in an open Couette flow reactor. Conditions also are found under which oscillations of the spatial structure become chaotic. The remarkable feature of these sustained spatiotemporal phenomena is the fact that they organize due to the interaction of the diffusion process with a chemical reaction which itself would proceed in a stationary manner if diffusion was negligible.

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