Analysis of discontinuous bifurcations in nonsmooth dynamical systems (Q691239)

This paper deals with bifurcations of periodic orbits in dynamical systems with discontinuous right-hand sides. Namely, the author considers systems which can be written in the form \[ \frac{dx}{dt}= \begin{cases} f_+(x,t),\qquad \text{with}\; H(x)>0, \\ f_-(x,t),\qquad \text{with}\; H(x)<0, \end{cases} \] with \(x\in\mathbb{R}^n\). It is also assumed that the equations depend on some parameter \(\lambda\). When periodic solutions touch the switching manifold \(H(x)=0\), there is a discontinuous change in the multipliers of the monodromy matrix leading to possible discontinuous bifurcations. A stepwise smoothing method is proposed to describe some typical scenarios: saddle-node, period doubling and Hopf bifurcations. The results are used to provide an analytic study of the grazing-sliding bifurcation in the model of a braking system in the case of linear dependence of the friction coefficient on the sliding velocity. A comparison with previous numerical results is also included.