Abstract
Past experiments on the formation of chemical spatial structures1–4 (mainly chemical waves) have been conducted in closed, batch systems such as Petri dishes5–15, and not in open chemostats such as those usually employed in the study of temporal structures. As a consequence, the observed spatial patterns change uncontrollably and ultimately decay as the mixture evolves towards thermody-namic equilibrium. We have overcome this problem in a novel type of open reactor: the reaction occurs in an annular inert gel that is fed at the inner and outer rims. The reaction that we have studied is the Belousov–Zhabotinskii (BZ) reaction, which has become the paradigm for studies of spatial and temporal structures in nonlinear systems. In the ring reactor we observe sustained travelling azimuthal waves for a wide range of conditions.
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Noszticzius, Z., Horsthemke, W., McCormick, W. et al. Sustained chemical waves in an annular gel reactor: a chemical pinwheel. Nature 329, 619–620 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/329619a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/329619a0
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