Bifurcations and chaos in autonomous self-excited oscillators with impact damping

Dynamics and bifurcations of a class of single-degree-of-freedom self-excited oscillators with an impact damper have been studied. The basic motivation is to determine a persistent bifurcation structure of co-dimension one which is independent of the exact functional form of the self-excitation mechanism. In the process, an analytical method for studying the qualitative dynamical features is presented. A new numerical scheme for analyzing the eigenproperties of a solution is developed. A detailed numerical study, revealing the superstructure of the bifurcation phenomena, has been performed. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited