Shaken, stirred — but not mixed

Chloride Ion Inhibition, Stirring, and Temperature Effects in an Ethylacetoacetate Briggs-Rauscher Oscillator in Phosphoric and Hydrochloric Acids in a Batch Reactor

Briggs-Rauscher oscillating reaction has been investigated in hydrochloric acid media and in the presence of added chloride ions in phosphoric acid media in a batch reactor using ethylacetoacetate as the organic substrate. The changes in key oscillation parameters, namely, induction period, oscillation period, amplitude, and so forth, have been explained in terms of the steps of the skeleton mechanism proposed by Furrow and Noyes and by de Kepper and Epstein. In spite of several shortcomings as outlined in section 2 in the text, the same mechanistic steps are good enough to explain qualitatively most of the changes in oscillation parameters under different stirring rates and temperatures in phosphoric acid and hydrochloric acid media, particularly stirring effects explained well by the theory of imperfect mixing. Potential data indicate that 0.018 M HCl medium has the ability to exhibit near-zero/zero amplitudes before cessation of oscillations. Inhibition reactions from a low Cl^- concentration in the 0.018 M HCl media appear to be responsible for this interesting dynamical transformation, as toward the end of oscillations, the difference between [I^-] and [I^-]_crit [see eq J in the text] becomes very small because of depleted component chemicals due to chemical reactions.

Rate of mixing controls rate and outcome of autocatalytic processes: theory and microfluidic experiments with chemical reactions and blood coagulation

This article demonstrates that the rate of mixing can regulate the rate and outcome of both biological and nonbiological autocatalytic reaction systems that display a threshold response to the concentration of an activator. Plug-based microfluidics was used to control the timing of reactions, the rate of mixing, and surface chemistry in blood clotting and its chemical model. Initiation of clotting of human blood plasma required addition of a critical concentration of thrombin. Clotting could be prevented by rapid mixing when thrombin was added near the critical concentration, and mixing also affected the rate of clotting when thrombin was added at concentrations far above the critical concentration in two clinical clotting assays for human plasma. This phenomenon was modeled by a simple mechanism--local and global competition between the clotting reaction, which autocatalytically produces an activator, and mixing, which removes the activator. Numerical simulations showed that the Damköhler number, which describes this competition, predicts the effects of mixing. Many biological systems are controlled by thresholds, and these results shed light on the dynamics of these systems in the presence of spatial heterogeneities and provide simple guidelines for designing and interpreting experiments with such systems.

Wavenumber distribution in Hopf-wave instability: the reversible Selkov model of glycolytic oscillation

We have investigated the short-wave instability due to Hopf bifurcation in a reaction-diffusion model of glycolytic oscillations. Very low values of the ratio d of the diffusion coefficient of the inhibitor (ATP) and that of the activator (ADP) do help to create short waves, whereas high values of the ratio d and the complexing reaction of the activator ADP reduces drastically the wave-instability domain, generating much longer wavelengths.