Page 15 - CBT 2018

Dynamical systems and chaos
Several nonlinear dynamical systems observed in nature feature chaos. One of the manifestations of chaos is sensitivity to the initial conditions – a phenomenon often referred to as the Butterfly effect, whereby an arbitrarily small perturbation of the current state may result in macroscopic changes in the future trajectories that the system can experience. Another distinctive feature of chaotic systems is the existence of strange attractors, where the system’s response has a tendency to display recognizable patterns, even though a trajectory never exactly repeats itself over time. Once some sequences have entered the attractor, nearby points will diverge from one another but will never depart from the attractor. CEGE students learn how to use numerical methods to compute the dynamic response of mechanical systems and apply these methods
to explore the complex behavior of chaotic systems.
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