Chaos and engineering

Advances in nonlinear dynamics have brought a revolution in the view of dynamical behaviour, with major implications for anyone engaged in engineering system design. The most obvious reason for knowing about chaos is to recognise it, and avoid it. For instance, chaotic modes of vibration can cause serious, and wholly unexpected, damage, threatening the stability of mechanical structures or of subsystems within communications networks. More positively, chaos can be useful. Many applications rely on some form of pseudorandom number generator: chaos theory offers a novel means of generating such numbers using simple functions. The author briefly explains the terminology of dynamic systems and then discusses Lorenz attractors, logistic mapping and bifurcation