Bifurcation phenomena in two-dimensional piecewise smooth discontinuous maps

In recent years the theory of border collision bifurcations has been developed for piecewise smooth maps that are continuous across the border and has been successfully applied to explain nonsmooth bifurcation phenomena in physical systems. However, there exist a large number of switching dynamical systems that have been found to yield two-dimensional piecewise smooth maps that are discontinuous across the border. In this paper we present a systematic approach to the problem of analyzing the bifurcation phenomena in two-dimensional discontinuous maps, based on a piecewise linear approximation in the neighborhood of the border. We first motivate the analysis by considering the bifurcations occurring in a familiar physical system-the static VAR compensator used in electrical power systems-and then proceed to formulate the theory needed to explain the bifurcation behavior of such systems. We then integrate the observed bifurcation phenomenology of the compensator with the theory developed in this paper. This theory may be applied similarly to other systems that yield two-dimensional discontinuous maps. (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics.[doi: 10.1063/1.3422475]