The Study of Kinetic Oscillations in the Catalytic CO-Oxidation on Single Crystal Surfaces

In the past decade the study of non-equilibrium systems has attracted a great deal of interest as more and more mathematical tools and theoretical concepts have been developed to try to understand the complex dynamical behavior of these systems. Although the prototype of such a chemical reaction system is still the Belousov-Zabotinskii (BZ)-reaction which takes place in the homogeneous fluid phase, there have also been numerous investigations of kinetic oscillations in heterogeneously catalyzed reactions amongst which the catalytic CO-oxidation has attracted most interest [1,2]. This can be attributed to the simplicity of the chemistry CO+1/2O₂→CO₂: However, despite numerous studies, reviewed recently by Schmitz [2] there still exists no commonly accepted mechanism among the different models which have been proposed.