Nonexistence and Uniqueness of Limit Cycles in a Class of Three-Dimensional Piecewise Linear Differential Systems

Abstract

During the last twenty years there has been increasing interest in studying the piecewise differential systems, mainly due to their many applications in natural science and technology. Up to now the most studied differential systems are in dimension two, here we study them in dimension three. One of the main difficulties for studying these differential systems consists in controlling the existence and nonexistence of limit cycles, and the numbers when they exist. In this paper, we study the nonsymmetric limit cycles for a family of three-dimensional piecewise linear differential systems with three zones separated by two parallel planes. For this class of differential systems we study the nonexistence, existence and uniqueness of their limit cycles.