Chaotic oscillations in a piecewise linear spring-mass system

Chaotic oscillations are useful in assessing the health of a structure. Hence, simple chaotic systems which can easily be realized mechanically or electro-mechanically are highly desired. We study a new piecewise linear spring-mass system. The chaotic behaviour in this system is characterized using bifurcation diagrams and the invariant parameters of the dynamics. We also show that there exists a stochastic analogue of this system, which mimics the dynamical features of its deterministic counterpart. This allows a greater flexibility in practical designs as the chaotic oscillations are obtained either deterministically or stochastically. Also, the oscillations are low dimensional, which reduces the computational resources needed for obtaining the invariant parameters of this system.