Identification of the intermittency-I route to chaos in oscillating CO oxidation on zeolite-supported Pd

For the oscillating oxidation of CO on a zeolite-supported palladium catalyst the transition to chaos could be observed in a very narrow region of the CO concentration in the feed. The reaction was carried out under the conditions of a continuous stirred tank reactor. A careful choice of the method for time series analysis led to the unambiguous identification of the intermittency-I route to chaos in the catalytic system despite the rather limited number of data points which can be acquired under normal pressure conditions. The route to chaos could be derived from the variation of the Fourier spectrum and the Poincare section as a function of the CO concentration in the feed. The embedding dimensions for the observed chaotic attractors of dE > or = 10 are much higher than the embedding dimensions obtained during UHV single crystal studies. High embedding dimensions indicate that the dynamic behaviour of the system has to be simulated with a distributed model which describes the collective behaviour of many Pd particles in the zeolite crystallite.