The stability of entrainment conditions forRLC coupled van der pol oscillators used as a model for intestinal electrical rhythms

A commonly accepted mathematical model for the slow wave electrical activity of the gastro-intestinal tract of humans and animals comprises a set of interconnected relaxation oscillators. The method of harmonic balance is used here to obtain analytical results for the entrained frequencies and amplitudes of two oscillators coupled with a parallelRLC network. By perturbations and linearisation about these values the conditions for stable limit-cycles are found and regions in theRLC parameter space which give one or two stable limit-cycle conditions are derived. These analytical results are compared with simulated results and found to creelate well for a waveshape factor of ε=0.1 and fairly well for ε=1.0. The single limit-cycle region corresponds to the requirement for a single mode having a frequency higher than the uncoupled value in small-intestinal data, while the double limit-cycle region corresponds to the two rhythms found in human large-intestinal activity.

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