Effect of temperature on precision of chaotic oscillations in nickel electrodissolution.

We investigate the effects of temperature on complexity features of chaotic electrochemical oscillations using the anodic electrodissolution of nickel in sulfuric acid. The precision of the "period" of chaotic oscillation is characterized by phase diffusion coefficient (D). It is shown that reduced phase diffusion coefficient (D/frequency) exhibits Arrhenius-type dependency on temperature with apparent activation energy of 108 kJ/mol. The reduced Lyapunov exponent of the attractor exhibits no considerable dependency on temperature. These results suggest that the precision of electrochemical oscillations deteriorates with increase in temperature and the variation of phase diffusion coefficient does not necessarily correlate with that of Lyapunov exponent. Modeling studies qualitatively simulate the behavior observed in the experiments: the precision of oscillations in the chaotic Ni dissolution model can be tuned by changes of a time scale parameter of an essential variable, which is responsible for the development of chaotic behavior. (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics.