Project title:

Project title: Dynamics of complex chemical systems

Project number: OTKA T 038071

Project leader: Dr. Vilmos Gáspár

Institute of Physical Chemistry, University of Debrecen

4010 Debrecen, P.O. Box 7, Hungary

gasparv@delfin.klte.hu

Brief summary of the research project:

During the last three decades nonlinear dynamics has grown into a new sub-field of natural sciences. Though, it helped to explain such exotic chemical phenomena as oscillations, chaos and chemical waves, the study of chemical chaos and pattern formation is still in the forefront of research interest. Studies on spontaneous pattern formation in chemical systems are extremely important due to the existence of quite similar phenomena during heart attack, in ion exchange processes of cells and neural systems, etc… The future of our sub-field greatly depends on the success of basic research as well as on being able to find practical applications of this basic knowledge about nature. Keeping in mind these goals, and continuing the successful research projects of the past few years, we plan our research in the following topics:

  1. Chemical waves and patterns

    1. Pattern formation in flow systems

      2. Study the dynamics of FDO patterns in the chlorine-dioxide-iodine-malonic acid (CDIMA) and Briggs-Rauscher reactions.

    2. Effect of light on the dynamics of chemical waves

    Study the effect of periodic and pulse illumination on the dynamics of spiral waves in the BZ-reaction. Control of spatio-temporal chaos (turbulence) in the BZ system.

  2. New reactors

    3. Studying the nonlinear dynamics of fed-batch reactors using pH-oscillating reactions.

  3. Periodic and chaotic pH-oscillations

    4. Design of new periodic and chaotic pH-oscillating reactions. Coupling of pH-oscillating reactions to gel systems and electrode diodes.

  4. Application of mass spectrometry in nonlinear dynamics

    5. Application of membrane inlet mass spectrometry to study the dynamics of oscillatory chemical reactions in solution phase.

  5. Nonlinear phenomena in electrochemical systems

Application of chaos control methods to experimentally determine the bifurcation diagram of oscillating and chaotic electrochemical systems (tracking). Finding the universal scaling law to characterise the dynamics of rotating disk electrode systems.

With this research we shall join the scientific programme "Nonlinear Chemistry in Complex Reactors: Models and Experiments (REACTOR)" of the European Science Foundation (ESF).