Reaction-diffusion patterns in one-side-fed reactors: Effects of boundary feed processes and spatial bistability

摘要

Experimental studies of the formation of Turing and other stationary front patterns are often performed in open spatial reactors consisting in thin films of gels where all the input species are diffusively fed by contact of one face with the contents of a continuous stirred tank reactor. This set-up is often thought to fit a 2-D pool-chemical approximation commonly used in most theoretical approaches. By comparing experimental observations and theoretical model calculations, we analyse in which conditions such an approximation is valid, discuss the role played by the nature of boundary conditions and comment on problems they raise in the use of one-side-fed open spatial reactors.