Appearance of chaos and hyperchaos in evolving pendulum network

Abstract

The study of deterministic chaos continues to be one of the important problems in the field of nonlinear dynamics. Interest in the study of chaos exists both in low-dimensional dynamical systems and in large ensembles of coupled oscillators. In this paper, we study the emergence of chaos in chains of locally coupled identical pendulums with constant torque. The study of the scenarios of the emergence (disappearance) and properties of chaos is done as a result of changes in (i) the individual properties of elements due to the influence of dissipation in this problem and (ii) the properties of the entire ensemble under consideration, determined by the number of interacting elements and the strength of the connection between them. It is shown that an increase of dissipation in an ensemble with a fixed coupling force and a number of elements can lead to the appearance of chaos as a result of a cascade of period-doubling bifurcations of periodic rotational motions or as a result of invariant tori destruction bifurcations. Chaos and hyperchaos can occur in an ensemble by adding or excluding one or more elements. Moreover, chaos arises hard since in this case, the control parameter is discrete. The influence of the coupling strength on the occurrence of chaos is specific. The appearance of chaos occurs with small and intermediate coupling and is caused by the overlap of the existence of various out-of-phase rotational mode regions. The boundaries of these areas are determined analytically and confirmed in a numerical experiment. Chaotic regimes in the chain do not exist if the coupling strength is strong enough. The dimension of an observed hyperchaotic regime strongly depends on the number of coupled elements.