34D20 Stability
In a strong constant electric field, a dielectric particle
immersed in a weakly conducting fluid exhibits spontaneous rotations. This phenomenon is known under the name of the Quincke effect. In the original setup the particle was suspended on a silk thread and performed torsional oscillations of remarkably high amplitude.
We derive the governing equations for this experiment, and
ascertain that onset of oscillations from the quiescent state corresponds to the supercritical Hopf bifurcation.
For the case of a soft thread, we characterize the regime of large-scale torsional relaxation oscillations: explicit estimates are derived for their period and amplitude,
effects of bifurcation delay are described. In a stronger electric field, these relaxation oscillations yield to small-scale erratic rotations of the pendulum.
Classical stability properties of solutions
that are well-known for ordinary differential
equations (ODEs) are generalized to differential-algebraic equations (DAEs).
A new test equation is derived for the analysis of numerical methods applied
to DAEs with respect to the stability of the numerical approximations.
Morevover, a stabilization technique is developed to improve the stability of classical DAE integration methods. The stability regions for these stabilized discretization methods are determined and it is shown that they much better reproduce the stability properties known for the ODE case
than in the unstabilized form.
Movies that depict the stability regions for several methods are included for interactive use.