Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Coexistence, Novel Bifurcations, and Chaos in a Cam-Follower System

This paper is concerned with the experimental and numerical analysis of an important class of impacting systems in applications: cam-follower devices. Experiments are reported showing the occurrence of complex dynamical scenarios in these systems including coexistence, discontinuity-induced bifurcations, and chaos. The most notable phenomenon is the sudden transition to chaos detected in the system which is shown to be due to the interruption of a complete chattering sequence. Further insight is gained by performing numerical analysis of an appropriately derived model of the experimental setup. Simulation, continuation, and cell-to-cell mapping algorithms are used to gain a complete picture of the observed dynamics in excellent qualitative agreement with the experimental observations.