Periodical forcing for the control of chaos in a chemical reaction -: art. no. 014707

Control of the chaotic behavior of a chemical system can be achieved perturbing periodically some control parameters of the system. This procedure based on external forcing, which is based on the phenomenon of resonance, can change a chaotic behavior into a periodical one by means of the application of a sinusoidal perturbation. In this paper, the influence of a periodical modulation added to the parameter controlling the oxygen adsorption rate in a cellular automaton (CA) model studying CO oxidation is analyzed. This CA model considers the oxidation reaction of CO on a catalytic surface, taking into account the catalyst temperature variation in order to analyze the reaction time oscillatory behavior. Simulations of the CA model exhibit chaotic and quasiperiodical behaviors, and it can be shown that the periodical forcing strategy can suppress the chaotic dynamics by means of the stabilization of periodical solutions. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.