Liesegang pattern formations are widely spread in nature. In spite of a comparably simple experimental setup under laboratory conditions, a variety of spatio-temporal structures may arise. Presumably because of easier control of the experimental conditions, Liesegang pattern formation was mainly studied in gel systems during more than a century. Here we consider pattern formation in a gas phase, where beautiful but highly complex reaction-diffusion-convection dynamics are uncovered by means of a specific laser technique. A quantitative analysis reveals that two different, apparently independent processes, both highly correlated and synchronized across the extension of the reaction cloud, act on different time scales. Each of them imprints a different structure of salt precipitation at the tube walls.

Since the early work on Liesegang rings in gels, they have been a reference point for the study of pattern formation in chemical physics. Here we present a variant of the Liesegang experiment in gas phase, where ammonia and hydrochloric acid react within a glass tube producing a precipitate, which deposits along the tube wall producing a spatial pattern. With this apparently simple experiment a wide range of rich phenomenon can be observed due to the presence of convective flows and irregular dynamics reminiscent of turbulent behavior, for which precise measurements are scarce. In this first part of our work, we describe in detail the experimental setup, the method of data acquisition, the image processing, and the procedure used to obtain an intensity profile, which is representative of the amount of precipitate deposited at the tube walls. Special attention is devoted to the techniques rendering a data series reliable for statistical studies and model building, which may contribute to a characterization and understanding of the pattern formation phenomenon under consideration. As a first step in this direction, based on our data, we are able to show that the observed band pattern follows, with slight deviations, the spacing law encountered in common Liesegang rings, despite that the experimental conditions are very different. A further statistical correlation analysis of the data constitutes Paper II of this research.