Bifurcation and Chaotic Behavior of Duffing System with Fractional-Order Derivative and Time Delay

Abstract

In this paper, the abundant nonlinear dynamical behaviors of a fractional-order time-delayed Duffing system under harmonic excitation are studied. By constructing Melnikov function, the necessary conditions of chaotic motion in horseshoe shape are detected, and the chaos threshold curve is obtained by comparing the results obtained through the Melnikov theory and numerical iterative algorithm. The results show that the trend of change is the same, which confirms the accuracy of the chaos threshold curve. It could be found that when the excitation frequency ω is larger than a certain value, the Melnikov theory is not valid for these values. Furthermore, by numerical simulation, some numerical results are obtained, including phase portraits, the largest Lyapunov exponents, and the bifurcation diagrams, Poincare maps, time histories, and frequency spectrograms at some typical points. These numerical simulation results show that the system exhibits some new complex dynamical behaviors, including entry into the state of chaotic motion from single period to period-doubling bifurcation and chaotic motion and periodic motion alternating under the necessary condition of chaotic occurrence. In addition, the effects of time delay, fractional-order coefficient, fractional order, linear viscous damping coefficient, and linear stiffness coefficient on the chaotic threshold curve are discussed, respectively. Those results reveal that there exist abundant nonlinear dynamic behaviors in this fractional-order system, and by adjusting these parameters reasonably, the system could be transformed from chaotic motion to non-chaotic motion.