Chaotic dynamics in an unstirred ferroin catalyzed Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction

The Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction is the best known example of far from equilibrium self-organizing chemical reaction. Among the many dynamical behaviors that this reaction can exhibit, spatiotemporal chaos attracted particular interest, both for the ferroin and cerium catalyzed systems. In recent years transient chaos was found in the cerium catalyzed BZ reaction, when conducted in batch and unstirred reactors. It was established that the chaotic oscillations, originated by the coupling among chemical kinetics and transport phenomena, appeared and disappeared following a Ruelle–Takens– Newhouse scenario. In this Letter, we show results about the ferroin catalyzed system conducted in batch and unstirred reactors. An aperiodic transient regime was detected and we show that this is a genuine manifestation of spatio-temporal chaos.