On a Painlevé II model in steady electrolysis: application of a Bäcklund transformation

A model equation of Painlevé II type was introduced by Bass in 1964 in connection with a boundary value problem which describes the electric field distribution in a region x > 0 occupied by an electrolyte. This is possibly the earliest explicit physical application of a Painlevé equation to be found in the literature. Here we return to this problem informed by the subsequent discovery of a Bäcklund transformation for Painlevé II. This enables us to construct exact representations for the electric field and ion distributions for boundary value problems wherein the ratio of fluxes of the positive and negative ions at the boundary adopts one of an infinite sequence of values.