Spatiotemporal Dynamics Of Heterogeneous Catalysis

This project studied the heterogeneous catalytic reaction of carbon monoxide and oxygen on the surface of thin platinum metal films to form carbon dioxide. Infrared imaging was used to study both the spatial and temporal behavior of the reaction. The mechanisms of spatial coupling in this system were studied as well as their effect on the resulting pattern formation. A complementary study was conducted to examine the effect of local perturbations in initiating catalytic behavior. An important conclusion of the work is that, while none of the currently proposed models completely describes the oscillatory catalytic behavior observed in this system, the oxidation-reduction model agrees best with the experimental results.