Fractional damping enhances chaos in the nonlinear Helmholtz oscillator

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to study both the underdamped and the overdamped dynamics of the nonlinear Helmholtz oscillator with a fractional-order damping. For that purpose, we use the Grunwald–Letnikov fractional derivative algorithm in order to get the numerical simulations. Here, we investigate the effect of taking the fractional derivative in the dissipative term in function of the parameter $$\alpha $$ . Our main findings show that the trajectories can remain inside the well or can escape from it depending on $$\alpha $$ which plays the role of a control parameter. Besides, the parameter $$\alpha $$ is also relevant for the creation or destruction of chaotic motions. On the other hand, the study of the escape times of the particles from the well, as a result of variations of the initial conditions and the undergoing force F, is reported by the use of visualization techniques such as basins of attraction and bifurcation diagrams, showing a good agreement with previous results. Finally, the study of the escape times versus the fractional parameter $$\alpha $$ shows an exponential decay which goes to zero when $$\alpha $$ is larger than one. All the results have been carried out for weak damping where chaotic motions can take place in the non-fractional case and also for a stronger damping (overdamped case), where the influence of the fractional term plays a crucial role to enhance chaotic motions. We expect that these results can be of interest in the field of fractional calculus and its applications.