A numerical study of chaos in a reaction‐diffusion equation

Abstract

Abstract A study is made using numerical experiments to see the effect of the parameters in the explicit Euler‐discretized form of a one‐dimensional, nonlinear, reaction‐diffusion equation. Based on a series of these experiments, one of the main results obtained is that diffusion, which is usually perceived as having a stabilizing effect, is able to produce chaotic as well as divergent numerical solutions. Furthermore, the discretization parameters are also able to produce chaotic results. From the results presented herein, it is shown that varying the parameters can produce solutions that are single numbers, periodic, aperiodic (chaos), or divergent.