Chlorite - Iodide Reaction : A Versatile System for the Study of Nonlinear Dynamicai Behavior

The autocatalytic reaction between chlorite and iodide ions exhibits a remarkable range of dynamical behavior. In a stirred tank reactor it shows bistability between steady states and between a steady and an oscillatory state. It forms the core of a large family of systematically designed chemical oscillators. The chlorite-iodide system has served as the prototype reaction in the discovery and investigation of mixing effects in stirred tank reactors, in studies of coupled oscillators, and in new experimental approaches to spatiotemporal bifurcation behavior. Mechanistic studies of the system have resulted in an eight-step mechanism that gives excellent agreement with nearly all the above observations.