György Károlyi

chaotic advection, diffusion, and reactions in open flows

We review and generalize recent results on advection of particles in open time-periodic hydrodynamical flows. First, the problem of passive advection is considered, and its fractal and chaotic nature is pointed out. Next, we study the effect of weak molecular diffusion or randomness of the flow. Finally, we investigate the influence of passive advection on chemical or biological activity superimposed on open flows. The nondiffusive approach is shown to carry some features of a weak diffusion, due to the finiteness of the reaction range or reaction velocity. (c) 2000 American Institute of Physics.

Chemical or biological activity in open chaotic flows.

We investigate the evolution of particle ensembles in open chaotic hydrodynamical flows. Active processes of the type A+B-->2B and A+B-->2C are considered in the limit of weak diffusion. As an illustrative advection dynamics we consider a model of the von Kármán vortex street, a time-periodic two-dimensional flow of a viscous fluid around a cylinder. We show that a fractal unstable manifold acts as a catalyst for the process, and the products cover fattened-up copies of this manifold. This may account for the observed filamental intensification of activity in environmental flows. The reaction equations valid in the wake are derived either in the form of dissipative maps or differential equations depending on the regime under consideration. They contain terms that are not present in the traditional reaction equations of the same active process: the decay of the products is slower while the productivity is much faster than in homogeneous flows. Both effects appear as a consequence of underlying fractal structures. In the long time limit, the system locks itself in a dynamic equilibrium state synchronized to the flow for both types of reactions. For particles of finite size an emptying transition might also occur leading to no products left in the wake.

Competing populations in flows with chaotic mixing

We investigate the effects of spatial heterogeneity on the coexistence of competing species in the case when the heterogeneity is dynamically generated by environmental flows with chaotic mixing properties. We show that one effect of chaotic advection on the passively advected species (such as phytoplankton, or self-replicating macro-molecules) is the possibility of coexistence of more species than that limited by the number of niches they occupy. We derive a novel set of dynamical equations for competing populations.

Chaotic tracer scattering and fractal basin boundaries in a blinking vortex-sink system

Abstract We consider passive tracer advection in a model of a large planar basin of fluid with two sinks opened alternately. In spite of the incompressibility of the fluid, the phase space of the tracer dynamics contains (simple) attractors, the sinks. We show that the advection is chaotic due to the appearance of a locally Hamiltonian chaotic saddle. Properties of this saddle and its invariant manifolds are investigated, and fractal and dynamical characteristics of the tracer patterns are extracted by means of the thermodynamical formalism applied to the time-delay function.

Dynamics of Finite-Size Particles in Chaotic Fluid Flows

We review recent advances on the dynamics of finite–size particles advected by chaotic fluid flows, focusing on the phenomena caused by the inertia of finite–size particles which have no counterpart in traditionally studied passive tracers. Particle inertia enlarges the phase space and makes the advection dynamics much richer than the passive tracer dynamics, because particles’ trajectories can diverge from the trajectories of fluid parcels. We cover both confined and open flow regimes, and we also discuss the dynamics of interacting particles, which can undergo fragmentation and coagulation.

Fractal structures in stenoses and aneurysms in blood vessels

Recent advances in the field of chaotic advection provide the impetus to revisit the dynamics of particles transported by blood flow in the presence of vessel wall irregularities. The irregularity, being either a narrowing or expansion of the vessel, mimicking stenoses or aneurysms, generates abnormal flow patterns that lead to a peculiar filamentary distribution of advected particles, which, in the blood, would include platelets. Using a simple model, we show how the filamentary distribution depends on the size of the vessel wall irregularity, and how it varies under resting or exercise conditions. The particles transported by blood flow that spend a long time around a disturbance either stick to the vessel wall or reside on fractal filaments. We show that the faster flow associated with exercise creates widespread filaments where particles can get trapped for a longer time, thus allowing for the possible activation of such particles. We argue, based on previous results in the field of active processes in flows, that the non-trivial long-time distribution of transported particles has the potential to have major effects on biochemical processes occurring in blood flow, including the activation and deposition of platelets. One aspect of the generality of our approach is that it also applies to other relevant biological processes, an example being the coexistence of plankton species investigated previously.

Doubly transient chaos: Generic form of chaos in autonomous dissipative systems

Chaos is an inherently dynamical phenomenon traditionally studied for trajectories that are either permanently erratic or transiently influenced by permanently erratic ones lying on a set of measure zero. The latter gives rise to the final state sensitivity observed in connection with fractal basin boundaries in conservative scattering systems and driven dissipative systems. Here we focus on the most prevalent case of undriven dissipative systems, whose transient dynamics fall outside the scope of previous studies since no time-dependent solutions can exist for asymptotically long times. We show that such systems can exhibit positive finite-time Lyapunov exponents and fractal-like basin boundaries which nevertheless have codimension one. In sharp contrast to its driven and conservative counterparts, the settling rate to the (fixed-point) attractors grows exponentially in time, meaning that the fraction of trajectories away from the attractors decays superexponentially. While no invariant chaotic sets exist in such cases, the irregular behavior is governed by transient interactions with transient chaotic saddles, which act as effective, time-varying chaotic sets.

Metabolic network dynamics in open chaotic flow

We have analyzed the dynamics of metabolically coupled replicators in open chaotic flows. Replicators contribute to a common metabolism producing energy-rich monomers necessary for replication. The flow and the biological processes take place on a rectangular grid. There can be at most one molecule on each grid cell, and replication can occur only at localities where all the necessary replicators (metabolic enzymes) are present within a certain neighborhood distance. Due to this finite metabolic neighborhood size and imperfect mixing along the fractal filaments produced by the flow, replicators can coexist in this fluid system, even though coexistence is impossible in the mean-field approximation of the model. We have shown numerically that coexistence mainly depends on the metabolic neighborhood size, the kinetic parameters, and the number of replicators coupled through metabolism. Selfish parasite replicators cannot destroy the system of coexisting metabolic replicators, but they frequently remain persistent in the system. (c) 2002 American Institute of Physics.

Autocatalytic reactions in systems with hyperbolic mixing: Exact results for the active Baker map

We investigate the effects of hyperbolic hydrodynamical mixing on the reaction kinetics of autocatalytic systems. Exact results are derived for the two-dimensional open Baker map as an underlying mixing dynamics for a two-component autocatalytic system, A + B→2B. We prove that chaotic advection modelled by the Baker map enhances the productivity of the reaction which is due to the fact that the reaction kinetics is catalysed by the fractal unstable manifold of the chaotic set of the reaction-free dynamics. The results are compared with phenomenological theories of active advection.

Symbolic dynamics of infinite depth: finding global invariants for BVPs

Abstract Continuing the work of Domokos and Holmes [G. Domokos and P. Holmes, J. Nonlinear Sci. 3 (1993) 109–151] and Domokos [G. Domokos, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. A 355 (1997) 2099–2116], we explore global bifurcation diagrams of elastic linkages subject to quasi-static, conservative, one-parameter load. The main result is an explicit construction of a finite length, infinite depth symbolic dynamics which uniquely characterizes all solutions of the boundary value problem (BVP). We give an estimate based on global symmetry arguments that provides a powerful tool for the numerical identification of the symbolic dynamics. The same estimate is helpful to find self-similar distribution patterns for the stable solutions.