Bifurcation and chaos detection of a fractional Duffing–van der Pol oscillator with two periodic excitations and distributed time delay

Abstract

This paper analytically and numerically investigates the dynamical characteristics of a fractional Duffing–van der Pol oscillator with two periodic excitations and the distributed time delay. First, we consider the pitchfork bifurcation of the system driven by both a high-frequency parametric excitation and a low-frequency external excitation. Utilizing the method of direct partition of motion, the original system is transformed into an effective integer-order slow system, and the supercritical and subcritical pitchfork bifurcations are observed in this case. Then, we study the chaotic behavior of the system when the two excitation frequencies are equal. The necessary condition for the existence of the horseshoe chaos from the homoclinic bifurcation is obtained based on the Melnikov method. Besides, the parameters effects on the routes to chaos of the system are detected by bifurcation diagrams, largest Lyapunov exponents, phase portraits, and Poincaré maps. It has been confirmed that the theoretical predictions achieve a high coincidence with the numerical results. The techniques in this paper can be applied to explore the underlying bifurcation and chaotic dynamics of fractional-order models.