Spatiotemporal chaos in a differential flow reactor

Abstract

The spatiotemporal evolution of a chemical system close to a Hopf bifurcation in a differential flow reactor is studied. The interaction of the Hopf-differential flow induced instabilities for the cubic autocatalator model is determined through the appropriate form of the complex Ginzburg–Landau equation for the evolving amplitude. New behaviour, including spatiotemporal chaos, is observed from this equation. These predictions are shown also to be a feature of the initial-value problem for the original autocatalator equations.