Effects of time delays on bifurcation and chaos in a non-autonomous system with multiple time delays

Time delays are often sources of complex behavior in dynamic systems. Yet its complexity needs to be further explored, particularly when multiple time delays are present. As a purpose to gain insight into such complexity under multiple time delays, we investigate the mechanism for the action of multiple time delays on a particular non-autonomous system in this paper. The original mathematical model under consideration is a Duffing oscillator with harmonic excitation. A delayed system is obtained by adding delayed feedbacks to the original system. Two time delays are involved in such system, one of which in the displacement feedback and the other in the velocity feedback. The time delays are taken as adjustable parameters to study their effects on the dynamics of the system. Firstly, the stability of the trivial equilibrium of the linearized system is discussed and the condition under which the equilibrium loses its stability is obtained. This leads to a critical stability boundary where Hopf bifurcation or double Hopf bifurcation may occur. Then, the chaotic behavior of such system is investigated in detail. Particular emphasis is laid on the effect of delay difference between two time delays on the chaotic properties. A Melnikov’s analysis is employed to obtain the necessary condition for onset of chaos resulting from homoclinic bifurcation. And numerical analyses via the bifurcation diagram and the top Lyapunov exponent are carried out to show the actual time delay effect. Both the results obtained by the two analyses show that the delay difference between two time delays plays a very important role in inducing or suppressing chaos, so that it can be taken as a simple but efficient “switch” to control the motion of a system: either from order to chaos or from chaos to order.