Homoclinic–Heteroclinic Bifurcations and Chaos in a Coupled SD Oscillator Subjected to Gaussian Colored Noise

The so-called coupled smooth and discontinuous (SD) oscillator whose stiffness term leads to a transcendental function is a simple mass-spring system constrained to a straight line by two parameters, which are the dimensionless distances to the fixed point. This paper studies the homoclinic–heteroclinic chaos in a coupled SD oscillator subjected to Gaussian colored noise. In order to investigate the chaos thresholds analytically, the piecewise linearization approximation is used to fit the transcendental function. Stochastic nonsmooth Melnikov method with homoclinic–heteroclinic orbits is developed to study chaos thresholds of oscillators with tri-stable potential. Based on stochastic Melnikov process, the mean square criterion and the rate of phase-space flux function theory are used to study the chaotic motions of a coupled SD oscillator under weak noise and strong noise, respectively. The obtained results show that it is effective to use the piecewise linear approximation to analyze chaos in the coupled SD oscillator subjected to Gaussian colored noise. It also lays the foundation for chaos research of other nonsmooth mechanical vibration systems under random excitation.