A discrepancy between experimental and computational evidence for chemical chaos

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Abstract
Hudson and Mankin studied the oscillatory Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction in a flow reactor and found ranges of a few percent of residence time within which behavior was a chaotic mixture of the regular behaviors on either side of that range. Our efforts to model that system computationally indicate that any range of chaotic behavior is less than one part per million of residence time. The discrepancy may mean that the experiments were influenced by the peristaltic pumping or by uncontrolled fluctuations of some other variable. It may also mean that the computational model was too simplified to reproduce the chaotic effects inherent in the real system. The only resolution we can suggest is that random fluctuations in a parameter like residence time may induce chaotic behavior over a range of average residence times that is much wider than the amplitudes of the fluctuations themselves.