Abstract
In a homogeneous chemical reaction maintained far from equilibrium where the reaction mechanism contains coupled feedback steps, oscillations in the concentrations of certain intermediates are possible. Until recently, the few known chemical oscillators were discovered accidentally, were variants of these reactions, or were extracted from biological systems. To provide new chemical oscillators for theoretical and experimental study, a program has been developed to design homogeneous oscillators based on reactions of inorganic compounds and ions. Mechanistic detail is presented for the chlorite-iodide-arsenite oscillator, and other newly designed oscillators are discussed more briefly. A classification scheme for grouping these and related oscillators is presented.