Abstract
Sustained aperiodic oscillation, or chemical chaos, has been observed to occur in the reaction between chlorite and thiosulfate at pH 4 in a flow reactor via two different routes. In the first, chaotic behavior is found between successive regions of increasingly complex periodic oscillation as the residence time is increased. The second route occurs only at higher [ClO−2]0. At high flow rates, a periodic low frequency oscillation is observed. On decreasing the flow rate, bursts of a second higher frequency oscillation appear, the system becomes quasiperiodic, chaotic and then finally periodic at the higher frequency. Both types of chaos are analyzed in terms of an experimentally determined cubic next amplitude map for the system.