A cellular automaton model for the catalytic oxidation of CO including CO desorption and diffusion: Intermittent oscillations in a cellular automaton model for a surface reaction

Abstract

The oxidation of carbon monoxide (CO) on a catalyst surface is studied with a cellular automaton (CA) model previously introduced in [22]. We expand the model in order to include the effects of CO desorption and diffusion. Both processes are considered probabilistic with probabilities p1 and p2, respectively. In this chapter we will observe that CO desorption widens the range of the thermal relaxation parameter γ for which the reaction shows an oscillatory behavior. In the range (0.009 < p1< 0.015) and near the CO poisoned state (0.30 ≤ γ< 0.35), the surface reaction shows intermittent oscillatory behaviors in which the regular quasiperiodic oscillations are interrupted by bursts of CO and O coverage. CO diffusion smooths that intermittent behavior with a reduction in the number of bursts and increases the time during which the reaction oscillates quasiperiodically.