Controlling Chemlcal Chaos 4957

The long-term unprcdictability associated with chaos may be undesirable in certain settings. Ott, Grebogi, and Yorke (Phys. Rev. Lett. 1990.64, 1196) have recently proposed a method by which any of the infinite number of unstable periodic orbits embedded within a strange attractor can be, in principle, stabilized through small, controlled perturbations of a system constraint. This method is applied to a prototype model for isothermal chemical chaos to stabilize period-1, period-2, and period-4 unstable limit cycles out of chaotic behavior. The method reduces to a simple geometrical algorithm when the strange attractor is described by a 1-D map.