The Dynamics of a Cyclic Ring of Coupled Duffing Oscillators
The dynamics of a planar ring of N coupled identical, damped Duffing oscillators with external excitation is considered. Each oscillator is in 1:1 resonance with all other oscillators. The external forcing is a mono-frequency excitation near primary resonance with each oscillator and the analysis is considered in the context of weakly nonlinear systems. The symmetry of the system is exploited to determine, for an arbitrary number of oscillators, all possible classes of periodic solutions at the excitation frequency. These are fixed-point solutions for the system and are determined by the averaged equations. These solutions are classified into standing waves, traveling waves, and motions in-phase with the external forcing. Linear stability analysis is described for each solution class containing the highest degree of symmetry. To continue the study to motions with smaller degrees of symmetry, numerical simulations using the bifurcation analysis and branch continuation software AUTO 97 are utilized. The study presents the specific example of the dynamics of three Duffing oscillators.