Reaction and diffusion in a lamellar structure: the effect of the lamellar arrangement upon yield

The yield of a competitive–consecutive chemical reaction in a lamellar structure is shown to be strongly influenced by the order in which the lamellae are arranged. Average measures of lamellar width, which take no account of the particular arrangement of the lamellae, perform poorly in predicting the yield. As the number of lamellae is increased, the range of possible yields grows with the number of permutations of the lamellae. The results are a warning that in order to match results from a lamellar model with experiment one needs a good deal of detailed information about the lamellae, beyond their mean width.