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Updated: Aug 20, 2026

The Diffusion of Passive Tracers in Laminar Shear Flow
Published on: May 1, 2018
Experimental studies of pattern formation in a reaction-advection-diffusion system
C R Nugent1, W M Quarles, T H Solomon
1Department of Physics, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 17837, USA.
Abstract:
Experiments are presented on pattern formation in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction in a blinking vortex flow. Mixing in this flow is chaotic, with nearby tracers separating exponentially with time. The patterns that form in this flow with the BZ reaction mimic chaotic mixing structures seen in passive transport. The behavior is analyzed in terms of a mixing time taum and a characteristic decorrelation time TBZ for the BZ system. Flows with taum comparable to or smaller than TBZ generate large-scale patterns whose features are captured by simulations of mixing fields for the flow.
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