Synchronization phenomena in the system consisting of m coupled Berger plates

The dynamical system arising in the study of nonlinear oscillations of a number of coupled Berger plates is considered. The dependence of the long-time behavior of the trajectories of the system on the properties of the coupling operator is studied. It is shown that the global attractor of the dynamical system is continuous with respect to the coupling parameter γ expressing the intensity of plate interaction. When γ →∞it converges upper semicontinuously to the attractor of the system generated by the projection of the vector field of the coupled system on the kernel of the coupling operator. For the particular case of 3-diagonal coupling operator the synchronization phenomenon at the level of attractors is stated for large values of γ as well as the absence of synchronization for γ small. The case of cluster synchronization is also considered. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved