Stochastic chaos in a Duffing oscillator and its control

Stochastic chaos discussed here means a kind of chaotic responses in a Duffing oscillator with bounded random parameters under harmonic excitations. A system with random parameters is usually called a stochastic system. The modifier ‘stochastic’ here implies dependent on some random parameter. As the system itself is stochastic, so is the response, even under harmonic excitations alone. In this paper stochastic chaos and its control are verified by the top Lyapunov exponent of the system. A non-feedback control strategy is adopted here by adding an adjustable noisy phase to the harmonic excitation, so that the control can be realized by adjusting the noise level. It is found that by this control strategy stochastic chaos can be tamed down to the small neighborhood of a periodic trajectory or an equilibrium state. In the analysis the stochastic Duffing oscillator is first transformed into an equivalent deterministic nonlinear system by the Gegenbauer polynomial approximation, so that the problem of controlling stochastic chaos can be reduced into the problem of controlling deterministic chaos in the equivalent system. Then the top Lyapunov exponent of the equivalent system is obtained by Wolf’s method to examine the chaotic behavior of the response. Numerical simulations show that the random phase control strategy is an effective way to control stochastic chaos.