Periodic Motions and Bifurcation Trees in a Periodically Excited Duffing Oscillator with Time-delay

In this paper, bifurcation trees of periodic motions in a periodically forced, time-delayed, hardening Duffing oscillator are analytically predicted by a semi-analytical method. Such a semi-analytical method is based on the differential equation discretization of the time-delayed, non-linear dynamical system. Bifurcation trees for the stable and unstable solutions of periodic motions to chaos in such a time-delayed, Duffing oscillator are achieved analytically. From the finite discrete Fourier series, harmonic frequency-amplitude curves for stable and unstable solutions of period-1 to period-4 motions are developed for a better understanding of quantity levels, singularity and catastrophes of harmonic amplitudes in the frequency domain. From the analytical prediction, numerical results of periodic motions in the time-delayed, hardening Duffing oscillator are completed. Through the numerical illustrations, the complexity and asymmetry of period-1 motions to chaos in nonlinear dynamical systems are strongly dependent on the distributions and quantity levels of harmonic amplitudes. With the quantity level increases of specific harmonic amplitudes, effects of the corresponding harmonics on the periodic motions become strong, and the certain complexity and asymmetry of periodic motion and chaos can be identified through harmonic amplitudes with higher quantity levels