I've been working with a liquid, excitable, ferroin catalyzed Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction in my research, and I'm continually encountering "spurious triggers". Basically the reaction starts red and creates a blue excitation wave when catalyzed by dipping a silver wire into the liquid for about 20 seconds. Problem is that these blue excitation waves also start at other locations in the dish that we don't catalyze. Since we are trying to study the dynamics of these excitation waves, it would be ideal to only have the waves that we want.

The question I'm asking is for others out there who work with BZ. Is there a way to reduce or control the spurious triggers or bulk oscillations of excitable BZ? Perhaps a recipe that is more amenable to studying reaction front dynamics?

My current recipe works out to be: Mix together four ingredients under a fume hood to get the following concentrations, 0.22 M H2SO4, 0.37 M NaBrO3, 0.12 M Malonic Acid (C3H4O4), and 0.12 M NaBr. Mixture turns a burnt orange. Stir for ~10 minutes until clear. Add ferroin indicator solution until a dark red. Pour thin layer into petri dish.

This recipe gives an excitable BZ reaction which should create blue excitation waves when catalyzed which return to red later. What I'm currently seeing looks more like the pictures below.