Turing pattern formation in anisotropic medium

Abstract

Diffusion of reacting species in chemical and biochemical systems in anisotropic medium is markedly different from those occurring in isotropic medium, therefore approximating diffusion coefficients as constants may not be desirable as this has dynamical consequences. This paper is devoted to the analytical and numerical investigation of the development of spatial patterns in such systems. To this end we consider a general reaction–diffusion system with concentration-dependent diffusion and formulate a scheme to derive the general form of envelope equation for such systems. The theory is applied to the chlorite–iodide–malonic acid system, a standard paradigm for activator–inhibitor mechanism, to derive the instability condition in terms of the anisotropy parameters (\(\kappa _{i}, i = u, v\) that impart concentration-dependence to the diffusion coefficients) and identify the supercritical and subcritical Turing regions in the bifurcation diagram. The theoretical predictions are in good agreement with the numerical simulations.