Noise-induced basin hopping in a vibro-impact system

The dynamics of vibro-impact systems of engineering interest is numerically studied by means of a prototype consisting of an oscillating cart containing a ball undergoing inelastic collisions with its walls. We have described a multistable regime, for which different attractors coexist with a complicated basin boundary structure in the phase space. We investigated the effect of adding a certain amount of parametric noise in this model, focusing on the basin hopping, i.e., the intermittent switching between basins of different attractors. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.