Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol.104, No.9, 3386-3390, 1996
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.