Deciphering and Controlling Intermittent Chaos on a Catalytic Wafer

In an earlier article in this meeting [1], we have demonstrated that the Karhunen-Lueve (KL) empirical eigen function technique can capture the thermal coherent structures of the spatio-temporal dynamics during CO oxidation on a Rh black/SiO2 wafer. Projection of the video images onto the phase space spanned by the empirical eigen functions yields a low-dimensional phase-space reconstruction of the spatio-temporal dynamics. We analyze the projected dynamics here and associate it with the classical Melnikov mechanism for intermittent chaos. Since the global dynamics of this chaotic attractor always returns to a fixed point in the phase space, we estimate the local dynamics in the neighborhood of the fixed point and use modal feedback to stabilize the chaotic behavior.