HANDBOOK OF EXPERIMENTAL CHAOTIC CIRCUITS AND THEIR SYNCHRONIZATION

Chaos is a remarkable phenomenon occurring in many nonlinear sys-tems, where the deterministic nature of the system structure conjugates with the irregularity of the behviour. Since the first findings on chaos in mathematical models, the idea of using electronic circuits as experimental testbeds for chaos aroses. The focus of this PhD thesis is indeed on an experimental approach to the study of chaos, to its characteristic features and to the synchronization properties mainly through chaotic circuit design implementation and experiments. Starting from general guidelines on how to impl,ement from a mathe-matical model, an electronic circuit governed by the some equations, a gallery of circuits (Chua, Lorenz, Rössler, Hindmarsh-Rose, Duffing, Langford, Colpitts and a memristive circuit) designed and implemented with off-the-shelf components is presented in Chapter 1. A general methodology for designing a new class of chaotic circuits based on time-delay is then discussed in Chapter 2. Chaos has unique properties even when two or more coupled chaotic systems are consi-dered. The experimental approach to this topic of chaos theory pursued in this thesis led to several important results that otherwise had not been possible to reveal. In fact, in Chapter 3 we discuss findings on the synchronization of chaotic circuits in the presence of either parametric or structural dissimetries, and present a very interesting observation of the circuits is minimized when the two circuits synchronously evolve. Finally, Chapter 4 discusses a new form of synchronization occurring when more than two nonlinear circuits are coupled in networks with particular topologies.