On Existence and Bifurcations of Periodic Motions in Discontinuous Dynamical Systems

In this paper, the existence and bifurcations of periodic motions in a discontinuous dynamical system is studied through a discontinuous mechanical model. One can follow the study presented herein to investigate other discontinuous dynamical systems. Such a sampled discontinuous system consists of two subsystems on boundaries and three subsystems in subdomains. From the theory of discontinuous dynamical systems, switchability conditions of a flow at and on the boundaries are developed. From such switchability conditions, grazing motions of a flow at boundaries are discussed, and sliding motions of a flow on boundaries are presented. Based on the motions in each domain and on each boundary, generic mappings are introduced. Using the generic mappings, mapping structures for specific periodic motions are developed. Based on the grazing conditions and appearance and vanishing conditions of sliding motions, parametric dynamics of the existences of the specific periodic motions are presented. In addition, the traditional saddle-node bifurcation, Neimark bifurcations and period-doubling bifurcation are used for parametric dynamics of periodic motions. Bifurcation trees of periodic motions varying with a system parameter are presented first, and phase trajectories of periodic motions are illustrated. The G-functions are presented for the illustration of the motion switchability at the boundaries and sliding motions on the boundaries. Codimension-2 parametric dynamics of periodic motions are studied and how to develop the 2D parametric maps for specific periodic motions are presented. In the end, periodic motions with grazing are illustrated.