The role of temperature in chemical and electrochemical instabilities

Chemical oscillatory reactions, which are a manifestation of dynamic self-organization in non-equilibrium systems, were theoretically predicted at the beginning of the 20th century by the theoreticians Lotka and Volterra. The most famous of such processes is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. Research on the mechanisms of such reactions generally focused on the search for kinetic sources of instability (i.e. for positive and negative feedback loops) under constant temperature conditions. Instead, this work is a synthetic review of oscillatory systems, in which temperature variations are (a) a result and b) the cause of oscillatory instabilities, including spatiotemporal pattern formation. Examples include thermokinetic oscillations in oxidations of gaseous fuels, and BZ reaction, and oxidation of sulfur-containing compounds with hydrogen peroxide. The experimental results are illustrated with an outline of kinetic mechanisms and numerical modeling.