Bifurcations

Technical problems often lead to differential equations with piecewise-smooth right-hand sides. Problems in mechanical engineering, for instance, violate the requirements of smoothness if they involve collisions, finite clearances, or stick-slip phenomena.

Dynamical system theory has developed rapidly over the past fifty years. It is a subject upon which the theory of limit cycles has a significant impact for both theoretical advances and practical solutions to problems. Hopf bifurcation from a center or a focus is integral to the theory of bifurcation of limit cycles, for which normal form theory is a central tool.

Instabilities of fluid flows and the associated transitions between different possible flow states provide a fascinating set of problems that have attracted researchers for over a hundred years. This book addresses state-of-the-art developments in numerical techniques for computational modelling of fluid instabilities and related bifurcation structures, as well as providing comprehensive reviews of recently solved challenging problems in the field.

The material in this book is based predominantly on my recent work. It is the first monograph on the subject, though some support material may overlap other monographs. The investigation of wave packets and their bi­ furcations is very interesting, and useful theoretically and in practice, not only in geophysical fluid dynamics, which is the field to which the theory is being applied here, but also in other fields in mathematics and the natural sciences.