Additive resonances of a controlled van der Pol–Duffing oscillator

The trivial equilibrium of a controlled van der Pol–Duffing oscillator with nonlinear feedback control may lose its stability via a non-resonant interaction of two Hopf bifurcations when two critical time delays corresponding to two Hopf bifurcations have the same value. Such an interaction results in a non-resonant bifurcation of co-dimension two. In the vicinity of the non-resonant Hopf bifurcations, the presence of a periodic excitation in the controlled oscillator can induce three types of additive resonances in the forced response, when the frequency of the external excitation and the frequencies of the two Hopf bifurcations satisfy a certain relationship. With the aid of centre manifold theorem and the method of multiple scales, three types of additive resonance responses of the controlled system are investigated by studying the possible solutions and their stability of the four-dimensional ordinary differential equations on the centre manifold. The amplitudes of the free-oscillation terms are found to admit three solutions; two non-trivial solutions and the trivial solution. Of two non-trivial solutions, one is stable and the trivial solution is unstable. A stable non-trivial solution corresponds to a quasi-periodic motion of the original system. It is also found that the frequency-response curves for three cases of additive resonances are an isolated closed curve. It is shown that the forced response of the oscillator may exhibit quasi-periodic motions on a three-dimensional torus consisting of three frequencies; the frequencies of two bifurcating solutions and the frequency of the excitation. Illustrative examples are given to show the quasi-periodic motions.