Reaction–diffusion systems are mathematical models which ex- plain how the concentration of one or more substances distributed in space changes under the influence of two processes: local chemical reactions in which the substances are transformed into each other, and diffusion which causes the substances to spread out over a surface in space.

This description implies that reaction–diffusion systems are naturally applied in chemistry. However, the system can also describe dynamical processes of non-chemical nature. Examples are found in biology, geology and physics and ecology. A traditionally common application of such processes is the modeling of naturally occurring textures, such as animal hide patterns.

Within the context of this project reaction-diffusion processes are simulated using a 3 dimensional computational model with varying parameters. The first step of this process is to calculate the concentrations of substances within a discretized volume, from which an isosurface at a specified substance concentration is subsequently derived. Depending on the simulation parameters, 3-dimensional arrangements emerge that exhibit varying properties, ranging from spaceframe like dense structures to loosely connected “pipe networks”, to regular 3-dimensional patterns.

A specialized JAVA library has been developed for this project, ReactP5, which facilitates the simulation of Reaction-Diffusion systems in 3 dimensions, using multi-threading.