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

Abstract: 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 ransition 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 the numerical analysis of an appropriately derived model of the experimental set-up. 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.