Discontinuous Bifurcation of a Soft-Impact System
In this paper, we investigate discontinuous bifurcations of a soft-impact system, which is nonsmooth at the switching boundary consisting of two parts. We find that there are no periodic orbits located only in the impact zone, and when grazing bifurcation on one part of the switching boundary occurs, the tangency point changes may occur for different bifurcation parameters, which is also verified by numerical simulation. In particular, we discover degenerate inner and external corner bifurcations, which can produce chaotic behavior, for example, period-doubling cascades and a degenerate inner corner bifurcation that induce chaotic responses. In this way, our investigation reveals the presence of narrow bands of chaotic motion induced by the afore mentioned dynamical phenomena.