A smooth and discontinuous oscillator. Theory, methodology and applications (Q526385)

This very interesting monograph starts with the basic description of the mechanical system with a survey of its new properties. Each of the announced properties are investigated in detail. The smooth and discontinuous (SD) oscillator was taken as an archetype of simple geometrical oscillator. In Chapter 2 the system with its first properties is presented and it is shown that the system may have qualitatively different behaviour depending on whether a geometrical parameter is equal to zero, in which case the right-hand side of the equation is discontinuous or irrational but smooth. Chapter 3 is devoted to the discontinuous case for damped or undamped cases, either for free oscillations or forced oscillations. In Chapter 4 a generalized winding number is introduced to study the resonance in the smooth or in the discontinuous cases. In Chapter 5 it is found that the universal unfolding with two parameters in the perturbed SD oscillator with a nonlinear viscodamping. This universal unfolding reveals the complicated codimension two bifurcation phenomena in the physical parameter space. Then, in Chapter 6 the author investigates a specific point of the very intricate asymptotic behaviour of the SD oscillator known as the Wada basin dynamics. The four following Chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10 deal with questions of methodology. A piecewise linear approach is suggested by the graph of the restoring force, then the averaging method is presented and used. Hopf bifurcations are shown to occur near the equilibria. Analytical calculations are performed using elliptic and hyperbolic functions. Finally a cell mapping method is introduced. Chapter 11 extends the analysis of the SD oscillator to situations involving coupling with other nonlinearities or higher-dimensional motions. The remaining chapters are concerned with experiments and applications. Experiments are presented in Chapter 12 in fields of mechanical and electronic devices. The seismograph presented in Chapter 14 involves the same kind of nonlinearity and behaves within the same kind of qualitative properties. Applications in mechanical engineering are presented in Chapter 4 with a device for isolating large six structures from ground vibrations or impacts, and then in modern electronics by a secure communication scheme Chapter 15. The comments about open problems and challenges given in the last chapter. The present monograph offers a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and postgraduate students in mechanical engineering, nonlinear dynamics and related areas, such as nonlinear modeling in various fields of mathematics, physics and the engineering sciences.