Chaotic Motors

We show that electric motors and dynamos can be used to illustrate most elementary instabilities or bifurcations discussed in courses on nonlinear oscillators and dynamical systems. These examples are easier to understand and display a richer behavior than the ones commonly used from mechanics, electronics, hydrodynamics, lasers, chemical reactions, and population dynamics. In particular, an electric motor driven by a dynamo can display stationary, Hopf, and codimension-two bifurcations by tuning the driving speed of the dynamo and the electric current in the stator of the electric motor. When the dynamo is driven at constant torque instead of constant rotation rate, chaotic reversals of the generated current and of the angular rotation of the motor are observed. Simple deterministic models are presented which capture the observed dynamical regimes. © 2012 American Association of Physics Teachers.