Oscillating dynamical system with nonlinear damping
In the study of dynamical systems, the van der Pol oscillator (named for Dutch physicist Balthasar van der Pol) is a non-conservative, oscillating system with non-linear damping. It evolves in time according to the second-order differential equation
where x is the position coordinate—which is a function of the time t—and μ is a scalar parameter indicating the nonlinearity and the strength of the damping.