GRAPH-THEORETIC CHARACTERIZATION OF BIFURCATION PHENOMENA IN ELECTRICAL CIRCUIT DYNAMICS

Abstract

This paper addresses bifurcation properties of equilibria in lumped electrical circuits. The goal is to tackle these properties in circuit-theoretic terms, characterizing the bifurcation conditions in terms of the underlying network digraph and the electrical features of the circuit devices. The attention is mainly focused on so-called singular bifurcations, resulting from the semistate (differential-algebraic) nature of circuit models, but the scope of our approach seems to extend to other types of bifurcations. The bifurcation analysis combines different tools coming from graph theory (such as proper trees in circuit digraphs, Maxwell's determinantal expansions or the colored branch theorem) with several results from linear algebra (matrix pencils, the Cauchy–Binet formula, Schur complements). Several examples illustrate the results.