ABSTRACT
The discovery of oscillating chemical reactions has accelerated the study of chemical pattern formation. Nonlinearities are the main ingredients for pattern formation in chemical systems, as well as in other nonlinear systems, and play important roles only when the system is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This chapter describes several novel designs for open reactors in which spatiotemporal chemical patterns can be sustained far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and explores phenomena observed in these reactors using oscillating chemical reactions. The wave phenomena in Belousov-Zhabotinskii (BZ) reaction has attracted as much, or even more, interest as in the temporal behaviour. The chapter describes some of the open reactors that have been developed to study temporal and spatial patterns of oscillating chemical reactions. It shows schematic diagrams of a continuous-flow stirred-tank reactor (CSTR) and continuously fed unstirred reactor (CFUR). Sustained spatiotemporal patterns, transitions and bifurcations sequences of spatial patterns are, for the first time, obtained using these reactors.
