MECHANISTIC DETAILS OF THE OSCILLATORY BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKII REACTION

The reactions constituting the mechanism of the oscillatory Belousov-Zhabotinskii (BZ) reaction may be divided into an inorganic and an organic subset. The former is well established and generally accepted, but the latter remains under development. There has been considerable work on component reactions of the organic subset over the past few years, but little effort has been made to incorporate the results of this work into an improved BZ mechanism. We do so and present a BZ mechanism containing 80 elementary reactions and 26 variable species concentrations and which implements recent experimental results and suggestions concerning the complicated organic chemistry involved. The possible role of organic radicals as a second control intermediate is explored. The rate constants of the inorganic subset also are adjusted for acidity effects. The performance of the model in simulating either quantitatively or semiquantitatively a number of recent BZ experiments is substantially better than that of previous models. Several areas in need of further work are identified. © 1990 American Chemical Society.