Analysis of stability and bifurcations of limit cycles in Chua's circuit through the harmonic-balance approach

Abstract

This paper presents a spectral approach, based on the harmonic-balance technique, for detecting limit-cycle bifurcations in complex nonlinear circuits. The key step of the proposed approach is a method for a simple and effective computation of the Floquet multipliers (FMs) that yield stability and bifurcation conditions. As a case-study, a quite complex system, Chua's circuit, is considered. It is shown that the spectral approach is able to accurately evaluate the most significant bifurcation curves.