Marginal stability boundaries for some driven, damped, non-linear oscillators

A procedure is developed for averaging the differential equations for certain non-linear oscillators which are damped and externally driven. The procedure makes possible the obtaining of marginal stability boundaries for bifurcations in parameter space and is useful for systems with unperturbed solutions involving Jacobi elliptic functions. Specific cases of a driven, damped pendulum, an anharmonie oscillator, a Duffing oscillator, and a non-linear Helmholtz oscillator are examined.