Periodic Oscillatory Solutions for a Nonlinear Model with Multiple Delays

For systems such as the van der Pol and van der Pol–Duffing oscillators, the study of their oscillation is currently a very active area of research. Many authors have used the bifurcation method to try to determine oscillatory behavior. But when the system involves n separate delays, the equations for bifurcation become quite complex and difficult to deal with. In this paper, the existence of periodic oscillatory behavior was studied for a system consisting of n coupled equations with multiple delays. The method begins by rewriting the second-order system of differential equations as a larger first-order system. Then, the nonlinear system of first-order equations is linearized by disregarding higher-degree terms that are locally small. The instability of the trivial solution to the linearized equations implies the instability of the nonlinear equations. Periodic behavior often occurs when the system is unstable and bounded, so this paper also studied the boundedness here. It follows from previous work on the subject that the conditions here did result in periodic oscillatory behavior, and this is illustrated in the graphs of computer simulations.