Session AM - Chaos and Fractals.
ORAL session, Sunday morning, November 23
Saratoga, SMH
Experiments are performed on long-range pattern formation for the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) chemical reaction in an alternating vortex chain. The system is arranged in an annular configuration to eliminate any end effects. The flow is generated by a magnetohydrodynamic technique in which a radial electrical current passing through the fluid interacts with an alternating magnetic field produced by an annular array of magnets below the fluid. The magnet array can be rotated either with a constant or an oscillating angular velocity (or a combination). If the array oscillates periodically, long-range transport is enhanced due to Lagrangian chaos, as was previously observed for a linear oscillating vortex chain. If the magnets rotate with a constant angular velocity, transport is almost ballistic, with a variance that grows quadratically with time. We are using the same flows to study traveling waves and front propagation in a reaction-diffusion-advection system – the BZ chemical reaction.