The Zhabotinskii reaction is an example of a chemical oscillator.

It was discovered
that a certain reaction involving citric acid, bromate ions, and sulfuric acid, when
combined with a cerium catalyst, could oscillate for long periods of time before
settling equilibrium. The mixture would oscillate between colored and clear for up to
an hour. The oscillations of colours are due to the fluctuation of intermediates of the
reaction when the reaction starts far from equilibrium. Some Zhabotinskii reaction
has been shown to behave chaotically.
Rossler and Wegman investigated chaos in the Zhabotinskii system by measuring
the electrochemical potential of zhabotinskii reaction in an isothermal continuous
stirred flow condition. The plot of the electrochemical potential over time shows that
the reaction is not periodic, at least not periodic over the time interval shown (see
graph below). If the observed oscillation is a limit cycle, then it has to be
complicated limit cycle. A complicated limit cycles implies that the cross section is
folded through the trajectory flow and therefore the existence of a possible
complicated limit cycle is evidence for chaos.

To distinguish between noise and chaotic behaviour, it is necessary to look at the

trajectory flow in state space. If the flow despite being blurred by exogenous noise
still remain somewhat confined to a sub-manifold of a detectable shape known to be
chaos producing in deterministic condition, then the system is capable of chaotic
behaviour. In the case of spiral type chaos, it is only necessary to measure one
variable to detect chaos. For example if the variable with the largest amplitude is
measure and then plot each recorded amplitude as a function of the one before, we
can produce a Li-Yorke type graph which is an indication of chaos. It was found that
the non planarity of a limit cycle in three or higher dimensional state space is
required for chaos is required for chaos. This finding suggest that all the all the
realistic chemical oscillators should be capable of chaos.
Motivated by the search for chemical chaos, Rossler and Willamowski proposed the
following chemical reaction system

Under isothermy, constant volume and well stirredness, we have the following rate
equations.

Where the dot represents the derivative with respect to time and no dot represents
the concentration of the corresponding reactant or intermediate species. Now if we
set the left side of the rate equations to zero, we obtain the equilibrium composition
of the as

If we hold the concentration of A1, A2, ... A5 constant and set all the rate constants
with the exception of K-1, K-2 and K-5 equal to 1 we can model the system using with
the following set of differential equations

This system models the concentration of reactants X, Y and Z as a function of time

and exhibits chaotic oscillation at specific values of a 1 to a3 and K-1, K-2 and K-5. For
example for k1a1 = 30, k1 = 0.5, k2 = 1, k2 = 0, k3a5 = 10, k3 = 0, k4 = 1, k4 = 0,
k5a4 = 16.5, and k5 = 0.5we get :