Bifurcation analysis of a delayed dynamic system via method of multiple scales and shooting technique

This paper presents a detailed study on the bifurcation of a controlled Duffing oscillator with a time delay involved in the feedback loop. The first objective is to determine the bifurcating periodic motions and to obtain the global diagrams of local bifurcations of periodic motions with respect to time delay. In order to determine the bifurcation point, an analysis on the stability switches of the trivial equilibrium is first performed for all possible parametric combinations. Then, by means of the method of multiple scales, an analysis on the local bifurcation of periodic motions is given. The static bifurcation diagrams on the amplitude-delay plane exhibit two kinds of local bifurcations of periodic motions, namely the saddle-node bifurcation and the pitchfork bifurcation, indicating a sudden emergence of two periodic motions with different stability and a Hopf bifurcation, respectively, in the sense of dynamic bifurcation. The second objective is to develop a shooting technique to locate both stable and unstable periodic motions of autonomous delay differential equations such that the periodic motions and their stability predicted using the method of multiple scales could be verified. The efficacy of the shooting scheme is well illustrated by some examples via phase trajectory and time history. It is shown that periodic motions located by the shooting method agree very well with those predicted on the bifurcation diagrams. Finally, the paper presents some interesting features of this simple, but dynamics-rich system.