Double Hopf Bifurcations and Chaos of a Nonlinear Vibration System

A double pendulum system is studied for analyzing the dynamic behaviour near a critical point characterized by nonsemisimple 1:1 resonance. Based on normal form theory, it is shown that two phase-locked periodic solutions may bifurcate from an initial equilibrium, one of them is unstable and the other may be stable for certain values of parameters. A secondary bifurcation from the stable periodic solution yields a family of quasi-periodic solutions lying on a two-dimensional torus. Further cascading bifurcations from the quasi-periodic motions lead to two chaoses via a period-doubling route. It is shown that all the solutions and chaotic motions are obtained under positive damping.