Border collision and fold bifurcations in a family of one-dimensional discontinuous piecewise smooth maps: divergence and bounded dynamics

Abstract

In this work we continue the study of a family of 1D piecewise smooth maps, defined by a linear function and a power function with negative exponent, proposed in engineering studies. The range in which a point on the right side is necessarily mapped to the left side, and chaotic sets can only be unbounded, has been already considered. In this work we are characterizing the remaining ranges, in which more iterations of the right branch are allowed and in which divergent trajectories occur. We prove that in some regions a bounded chaotic repellor always exists, which may be the only non-divergent set, or it may coexist with an attracting cycle. In another range, in which divergence cannot occur, we prove that unbounded chaotic sets always exist. The role of particular codimension-two points is evidenced, associated with fold bifurcations and border collision bifurcations (BCBs), related to cycles having the same symbolic sequences. We prove that they exist related to the border collision of any admissible cycle. We show that each BCB, each fold bifurcation and each homoclinic bifurcation is a limit set of infinite families of other BCBs.