Regular oscillations, chaos, and multistability in a system of two coupled van der Pol oscillators: numerical and experimental studies

In this paper, the dynamics of a system of two coupled van der Pol oscillators is investigated. The coupling between the two oscillators consists of adding to each one’s amplitude a perturbation proportional to the other one. The coupling between two laser oscillators and the coupling between two vacuum tube oscillators are examples of physical/experimental systems related to the model considered in this paper. The stability of fixed points and the symmetries of the model equations are discussed. The bifurcations structures of the system are analyzed with particular attention on the effects of frequency detuning between the two oscillators. It is found that the system exhibits a variety of bifurcations including symmetry breaking, period doubling, and crises when monitoring the frequency detuning parameter in tiny steps. The multistability property of the system for special sets of its parameters is also analyzed. An experimental study of the coupled system is carried out in this work. An appropriate electronic simulator is proposed for the investigations of the dynamic behavior of the system. Correspondences are established between the coefficients of the system model and the components of the electronic circuit. A comparison of experimental and numerical results yields a very good agreement.