Percolative diffusion of CO during CO oxidation on Pt(100)

During CO-oxidation on Pt(100), CO diffuses in a ''disordered environment'' produced by a complex pattern of reconstructed and unreconstructed regions of the substrate. Macroscopic diffusion of CO is effectively only possible on percolating 1X1-regions of the substrate. We treat the spatio-temporal behavior observed in this reaction system accounting in the simple way for the percolative nature of CO-diffusion. This is done via incorporation into the reaction-diffusion equations of a suitable chemical diffusion coefficient, exploiting ideas from the theory of transport in disordered media. We use these equations to analyze the propagation of reactive, O-rich pulses into a CO-covered 1X1-background. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.