Belousov-Zhabotinsky

About

The python package you never knew you needed! Now you can appreciate all the glory of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction from the comfort of your console window in a state of the art ASCII art rendering. Your life will never be the same!

This a little python script I made for a class sometime ago. You can play around with the equations coefficients and rendering parameters with command line arguments (see usage). Besides the BZ equation there's also the FitzHugh-Nagumo (for Turing patterns), Gray-Scoot and Cahn-Hilard (simulates phase separation) equations.

Theory

The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction is the classical examples of non-linear/oscillatory dynamics in chemical systems. The equations that describe the process are reaction-diffusion equations:

BZ Equations:

Numerally you iterate the equations in a 2D grid. The Laplace operator in a discrete grid is simply a convolution.

You can learn more about the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction here:

• Dynamics and Chaos - Steven H. Strogatz

• Chaotic Dynamics, an introduction - G. L. Baker and J. P. Gollub

Inspired by the following blog posts:

Installation

Should work in any python3 version

Needs numpy and scipy

See piplock file

You can pip install the python module with the following command

pip install --user belousov-zhabotinsky

Usage

$ belousov-zhabotinsky

or

$ python -m belousov-zhabotinsky

Check cli options with:

$ belousov-zhabotinsky --help

You can exit the program by pressing any key

• Gray-Scott mode requires a terminal size bigger than 100x100 to work properly
• There's a plot.py script thay can be use to plot the system in matplotlib.

$ python -m belousov-zhabotinsky.plot

Future

• Fix Gray-Scott
• Make it faster

My First GitHub project; HOORAY!