Effect of Nonlinear Dissipation on the Basin Boundaries of a Driven Two-Well Modified Rayleigh–Duffing Oscillator

Abstract

This paper considers the effect of nonlinear dissipation on the basin boundaries of a driven two-well modified Rayleigh–Duffing oscillator where pure cubic, unpure cubic, pure quadratic and unpure quadratic nonlinearities are considered. By analyzing the potential, an analytic expression is found for the homoclinic orbit. The Melnikov criterion is used to examine a global homoclinic bifurcation and transition to chaos. Unpure quadratic parameter and parametric excitation amplitude effects are found on the critical Melnikov amplitude μ cr . Finally, the phase space of initial conditions is carefully examined in order to analyze the effect of the nonlinear damping, and particularly how the basin boundaries become fractalized.