Chaos in the three-well potential system

A new approach based on analysis of the wandering trajectories is applied to investigate an appearance of chaotic vibrations in many-well potential systems. The chaotic behavior regions were found in the both amplitude-frequency of excitation and amplitude-damping coefficient plane. The phase plane of initial conditions has been investigated taking into account different values of an external periodic excitation. It demonstrated remarkable agreement with investigations based on homoclinic and heteroclinic bifurcation criteria for chaos, computations of Lyapunov exponents and fractal basin boundaries. The presented technique is very effective, convenient to use, and can be applied to the investigation of a wide class of problems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.