Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

What is a practical application of oscillating reactions in the real world? Please answer as this will be my purpose for my science fair project about oscillating reactions. Thanks!

Rajiv Nair

Hi Rajiv,

Since this is the purpose of your science fair project, you'll want to do some background research of your own to understand how oscillating reactions work and why they are important. But, I'll give you a couple of things to get started. First, oscillating reactions helped chemists understand more factors about how reactions work. See, for example, the "chemical mechanism" section of this Wikipedia article about one particular oscillating reaction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briggs%E2% ... r_reaction. Second, some researchers have used oscillating reactions to determine concentrations of chemicals like vanillin. You can read more about that application in this article (warning--it's dense!)

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleL ... ivAbstract