Skip to Main Content

Transactions of the American Mathematical Society

Published by the American Mathematical Society since 1900, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society is devoted to longer research articles in all areas of pure and applied mathematics.

ISSN 1088-6850 (online) ISSN 0002-9947 (print)

The 2020 MCQ for Transactions of the American Mathematical Society is 1.48.

What is MCQ? The Mathematical Citation Quotient (MCQ) measures journal impact by looking at citations over a five-year period. Subscribers to MathSciNet may click through for more detailed information.

 

Chaotic vibrations of the one-dimensional wave equation due to a self-excitation boundary condition. Part I: Controlled hysteresis
HTML articles powered by AMS MathViewer

by Goong Chen, Sze-Bi Hsu, Jianxin Zhou, Guanrong Chen and Giovanni Crosta PDF
Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 350 (1998), 4265-4311 Request permission

Abstract:

The study of nonlinear vibrations/oscillations in mechanical and electronic systems has always been an important research area. While important progress in the development of mathematical chaos theory has been made for finite dimensional second order nonlinear ODEs arising from nonlinear springs and electronic circuits, the state of understanding of chaotic vibrations for analogous infinite dimensional systems is still very incomplete. The 1-dimensional vibrating string satisfying $w_{tt}- w_{xx}=0$ on the unit interval $x \in (0,1)$ is an infinite dimensional harmonic oscillator. Consider the boundary conditions: at the left end $x=0$, the string is fixed, while at the right end $x=1$, a nonlinear boundary condition $w_{x}= \alpha w_t - \beta w_{t}^{3}, \alpha , \beta >0$, takes effect. This nonlinear boundary condition behaves like a van der Pol oscillator, causing the total energy to rise and fall within certain bounds regularly or irregularly. We formulate the problem into an equivalent first order hyperbolic system, and use the method of characteristics to derive a nonlinear reflection relation caused by the nonlinear boundary condition. Since the solution of the first order hyperbolic system depends completely on this nonlinear relation and its iterates, the problem is reduced to a discrete iteration problem of the type $u_{n+1}=F(u_n)$, where $F$ is the nonlinear reflection relation. We say that the PDE system is chaotic if the mapping $F$ is chaotic as an interval map. Algebraic, asymptotic and numerical techniques are developed to tackle the cubic nonlinearities. We then define a rotation number, following J.P. Keener [J.P. Keener, Chaotic behavior in piecewise continuous difference equations, Transactions Amer. Math. Soc., 261 (1980), 589–604], and obtain denseness of orbits and periodic points by either directly constructing a shift sequence or by applying results of M.I. Malkin [M.I. Malkin, Rotation intervals and the dynamics of Lorenz type mappings, Selecta Math. Sovietica 10(3) (1991), 265–275] to determine the chaotic regime of $\alpha$ for the nonlinear reflection relation $F$, thereby rigorously proving chaos. Nonchaotic cases for other values of $\alpha$ are also classified. Such cases correspond to limit cycles in nonlinear second order ODEs. Numerical simulations of chaotic and nonchaotic vibrations are illustrated by computer graphics.
References
Similar Articles
Additional Information
  • Goong Chen
  • Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843
  • Email: gchen@math.tamu.edu
  • Sze-Bi Hsu
  • Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30043, Taiwan, R.O.C.
  • Email: sbhsu@am.nthu.edu.tw
  • Jianxin Zhou
  • Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Texas A& M University, College Station, Texas 77843
  • Email: jzhou@math.tamu.edu
  • Guanrong Chen
  • Affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204-4793
  • Email: chengr@tree.egr.uh.edu
  • Giovanni Crosta
  • Affiliation: Department of Environmental Science, University of Milan, Milan I-20126, Italy
  • MR Author ID: 52940
  • Email: giovanni@alpha.disat.unimi.it
  • Received by editor(s): July 20, 1995
  • Received by editor(s) in revised form: October 16, 1996
  • Additional Notes: The first and third authors’ work was supported in part by NSF Grant DMS 9404380, Texas ARP Grant 010366-046, and Texas A&M University Interdisciplinary Research Initiative IRI 96-39. Work completed while the first author was on sabbatical leave at the Institute of Applied Mathematics, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30043, Taiwan, R.O.C. The second author’s work was supported in part by Grant NSC 83-0208-M-007-003 from the National Council of Science of the Republic of China.
  • © Copyright 1998 American Mathematical Society
  • Journal: Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 350 (1998), 4265-4311
  • MSC (1991): Primary 35L05, 35L70, 58F39, 70L05
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9947-98-02022-4
  • MathSciNet review: 1443867