Self-oscillation

By Alejandro Jenkins. 2011

352 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Physicists are very familiar with forced and parametric resonance, but usually not with selfoscillation, a property of certain dynamical systems that gives rise to a great variety of vibrations, both useful and destructive. In a self-oscillator, the driving force is controlled by the oscillation itself so that it acts in phase with the velocity, causing a negative damping that feeds energy into the vibration: no external rate needs to be adjusted to the resonant frequency. A little-known paper from 1830 by G. B. Airy provides us with the opening to introduce self-oscillation as a sort of “perpetual” motion responsible for the human voice. The famous collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in 1940, often attributed by introductory physics texts to forced resonance, was actually a self-oscillation, as was the swaying of the London Millennium Footbridge in 2000. Clocks are self-oscillators, as are bowed and wind musical instruments. The heart is a “relaxation oscillator,” i.e., a non-sinusoidal self-oscillator whose period is determined by sudden, nonlinear switching at thresholds. We review the general criterion that determines whether a linear system can self-oscillate. We then describe the limiting cycles of the simplest nonlinear self-oscillators. We characterize the operation of motors as self-oscillation and prove a general theorem about their limit efficiency, of which Carnot’s theorem for heat engines appears as a special case. We also briefly discuss how self-oscillation applies to servomechanisms, Cepheid variable stars, lasers, and the macroeconomic business cycle, among other applications.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac8ac515227e1b1026bac0f4e336993b7b8edbbd

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Citations in the corpus

Coronal Heating by MHD Waves (2020, background): “For instance, Nakariakov et al. (2016) interpreted these decayless kink oscillations as a self-oscillatory process (a process in which the driver is a consequence of the oscillation itself, see Jenkins 2013), driven by interaction between the loops and quasi-steady flows at the loop footpoints.”
Spin-Torque and Spin-Hall Nano-Oscillators (2015, background): “Auto-oscillation refers to the phenomenon where a system responds with periodic motion to an external power source that lacks any related periodicity [53].”