Predicting the progress of diffusively limited chemical reactions in the presence of chaotic advection.

The effects of chaotic advection and diffusion on fast chemical reactions in two-dimensional fluid flows are investigated using experimentally measured stretching fields and fluorescent monitoring of the local concentration. Flow symmetry, Reynolds number, and mean path length affect the spatial distribution and time dependence of the reaction product. A single parameter lambdaN , where lambda is the mean Lyapunov exponent N and is the number of mixing cycles, can be used to predict the time-dependent total product for flows having different dynamical features.