Safety criteria for aperiodic dynamical systems

The use of dynamical system models is commonplace in many areas of science and engineering. One is often interested in whether the attracting solutions in these models are robust to perturbations of the equations of motion. This question is extremely important in situations where it is undesirable to have a large response to perturbations for reasons of safety. An especially interesting case occurs when the perturbations are aperiodic and their exact form is unknown. Unfortunately, there is a lack of theory in the literature that deals with this situation. It would be extremely useful to have a practical technique that provides an upper bound on the size of the response for an arbitrary perturbation of given size. Estimates of this form would allow the simple determination of safety criteria that guarantee the response falls within some pre-specified safety limits. An excellent area of application for this technique would be engineering systems. Here one is frequently faced with the problem of obtaining safety criteria for systems that in operational use are subject to unknown, aperiodic perturbations. In this thesis I show that such safety criteria are easy to obtain by using the concept of persistence of hyperbolicity. This persistence result is well known in the theory of dynamical systems. The formulation I give is functional analytic in nature and this has the advantage that it is easy to generalise and is especially suited to the problem of unknown, aperiodic perturbations. The proof I give of the persistence theorem provides a technique for obtaining the safety estimates we want and the main part of this thesis is an investigation into how this can be practically done. The usefulness of the technique is illustrated through two example systems, both of which are forced oscillators. Firstly, I consider the case where the unforced oscillator has an asymptotically stable equilibrium. A good application of this is the problem of ship stability. The model is called the escape equation and has been argued to capture the relevant dynamics of a ship at sea. The problem is to find practical criteria that guarantee the ship does not capsize or go through large motions when there are external influences like wind and waves. I show how to provide good criteria which ensure a safe response when the external forcing is an arbitrary, bounded function of time. I also consider in some detail the phased-locked loop. This is a periodically forced oscillator which has an attracting periodic solution that is synchronised (or phase-locked) with the external forcing. It is interesting to consider the effect of small aperiodic variations in the external forcing. For hyperbolic solutions I show that the phase-locking persists and I give a method by which one can find an upperbound on the maximum size of the response