Emergence of mono-cluster flocking in the thermomechanical Cucker–Smale model under switching topologies

Abstract

We study the emergent dynamics of the thermomechanical Cucker–Smale (TCS) model with switching network topologies. The TCS model is a generalized CS model with extra internal dynamical variable called “temperature” in which isothermal case exactly coincides with the CS model for flocking. In previous studies, emergent dynamics of the TCS model has been mostly restricted to some static network topologies such as complete graph, connected graph with positive in and out degrees at each node, and digraphs with spanning trees. In this paper, we consider switching network topologies with a spanning tree in a sequence of time-blocks, and present two sufficient frameworks leading to the asymptotic mono-cluster flocking in terms of initial data and system parameters. In the first framework in which the sizes of time-blocks are uniformly bounded by some positive constant, we show that temperature and velocity diameters tend to zero exponentially fast, and spatial diameter is uniformly bounded. In the second framework, we admit a situation in which the sizes of time-blocks may grow mildly by a logarithmic function. In latter framework, our temperature and velocity diameters tend to zero at least algebraically slow.