Dynamics of impact oscillator with dry friction

Our investigations of the dynamics of a simple mechanical system show that (i) the structure of the bifurcation diagram seems to be independent of the friction models, and (ii) small changes of experimentally estimated parameters like friction and restitution coefficients (within the error of estimation) can lead to significant qualitative changes in the systemʹs dynamics. The last observation shows that for such systems it is very difficult (if not impossible) to build mathematical models which can qualitatively describe experimental results for all possible values of system parameters.