On phase correspondence between chemical oscillations in liquid Belousov-Zhabotinsky mixture filling catalyst-containing matrix and resulted gel's chemomechanical oscillations

Abstract

We investigated phases and phase differences between coupled mechanical and chemical self-oscillations running in two kinds of newly synthesised chemomechanical gels. Processing of experimental data was model-free and it was based on spectral and wavelet approaches of the theory of dynamical systems. It was applied to samples of different sizes and compositions (Ru- and Fe-based gels). It was revealed that the Ru-based gels demonstrate a faster mechanical response to the redox changes of the Ru-moiety coupled to the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction than the Fe-based gels. This demonstrated a significant phase difference between the redox changes of the Fe-moiety and the mechanical oscillations. Special attention was paid to the phase-coupling features for averaged higher harmonics, which are significant due to the high degree of nonlinearity of the chemomechanical oscillatory process.