Chemical and Electrochemical Waves

Chemical waves arise when reaction and diffusion occur simultaneously. We shall see that chemical reaction is represented in the governing equations by nonlinear source terms. Molecular diffusion tends to smear out chemical concentrations, whilst suitable chemical reactions tend to sharpen them. We will concentrate here on chemical reactions occurring in solution, which are not strongly exothermic. We have already seen in subsection 7.2.5 that exothermic reactions can generate detonation waves.