Comments on “Shilnikov chaos and Hopf bifurcation in three-dimensional differential system”

Abstract

In the commented paper, the authors consider a three-dimensional system and analyze the presence of Shilnikov chaos as well as a Hopf bifurcation. On the one hand, they state that the existence of a chaotic attractor is verified via the homoclinic Shilnikov theorem. The homoclinic orbit of this system is determined by using the undetermined coefficient method, introduced by Zhou et al. in [Chen's attractor exists, Int. J. Bifurcation Chaos 14 (2004) 3167–3178], a paper that presents very serious shortcomings. However, it has been cited dozens of times and its erroneous method has been copied in lots of papers, including the commented paper where an even expression for the first component of the homoclinic connection is used. It is evident that this even expression cannot represent the first component of a Shilnikov homoclinic connection, an orbit which is necessarily non-symmetric. Consequently, the results stated in Section 3, the core of the paper, are worthless. On the other hand, the study of the Hopf bifurcation presented in Section 4 is also wrong because the first Lyapunov coefficient provided by the authors is incorrect.