A novel chaotic oscillator with a half-line of unstable equilibria: Basins of attraction, chaos control, chaos synchronization, and encryption applications

Abstract

A novel 3D chaotic oscillator that incorporates quadratic and absolute-function nonlinearities is introduced in this paper. The system dynamics are explored using the Lyapunov direct method, phase plane trajectories, time response, Lyapunov exponents, bifurcation diagrams, and basins of attraction. The uniqueness and existence of the system solution have been proven. The analytical investigations show that the system has two stable equilibrium points along with one unstable equilibrium point and a line of equilibria. The positive half of this line represents unstable equilibria, while the negative half is associated with stable equilibria. Additionally, it is found that the oscillator exhibits a chaotic basin of attraction centered along the line of equilibria and surrounded by a fixed-point attractor. An electronic circuit using Multisim software is designed to demonstrate the possibility of physical implementation for the considered mathematical model. Chaos control is addressed using adaptive and sliding mode control strategies. The performance of both control methods is compared, with the sliding mode control demonstrating superior results in both fast response and small transient overshoot. Furthermore, a novel sliding mode controller for master–slave synchronization is introduced, showing high performance compared to other sliding-mode and adaptive control methods applied in the literature. Finally, the proposed oscillator is employed as a Pseudo Random Number Generator (PRNG) for image encryption applications using a new encryption model. The experimental results confirm the high security and robustness of the proposed encryption algorithm against various attack methods.