Hyperchaos in a Spacecraft Power System

This paper presents some rigorous arguments on a chaotic strange attractor in a spacecraft power system, which is a 3D system with hysteresis switching. By carefully picking a suitable cross-section with respect to the attractor, we find a topological horseshoe of the corresponding third-returned Poincare map, thus giving a rigorous verification of the existence of chaos in this system. Numerical computation shows that the two Lyapunov exponents of the Poincare map are both positive and that there exists a two-directional expansion in this horseshoe, suggesting that this attractor is hyperchaotic in nature.