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Abstract
Chemical reaction mechanisms are widely used in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering to capture in a compact way the knowledge about the interactions among chemical species during reactions, as well as for practical purposes such as reactor design and operation. In addition to these common uses, chemical reaction mechanisms can be used unconventionally. We will illustrate this with two examples. In the first one, we use the chemical mechanism of a widely known oscillatory reaction to explain the experimentally observed effects on the oscillatory profile when noise is selectively applied to each of the reactant feedrates. The second example shows how the development of a chemical reaction mechanism for photopolymerization helped us understand the dominant events as polymerization progresses and additionally revealed which variables and parameters in the experimental setup are most critical.