Chaos in kinetic experiments

Recent reviews on chaos in chemical kinetics have been given by Swinney Roux (1984) and by Epstein (1983). Here we shall rely heavily on these papers. 

Olsen Degn (1977) first observed nonperiodic behaviour in an enzyme system. Soon after observations of nonperiodic behaviour in the Belousov-Zhabotinskii (BZ) reaction were reported by Schmitz et al. (1977), Rossler Wegmann (1978), Vidal et al. (1977), Hudson et al. (1979) and others. 

By the time of the 1981 Bordeaux conference observations of nonperiodic behaviour in CSTRs had begun to be analysed by different methods. These methods are reviewed by Swinney Roux (1984) and newer methods have been proposed and shown to work in the chemical applications. 

However, at that time there still existed a healthy scepticism regarding the existence of nonperiodic behaviour in well-controlled reactions. After all, nonperiodic behaviour can arise from fluctuations in stirring rate or flow rate, evolution of gas bubbles from the reaction, spatial inhomogeneities due to incomplete mixing, vibrations in the stirring motor, fluctuations in the amount of chemical components (such as bromide and dissolved oxygen) in the feed, and so on. Any experimental data, no matter how well a system is 

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