Students in ECE 6564 — Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos at Georgia Tech Europe develop final projects connecting the theoretical tools of nonlinear dynamics to concrete engineering, physical, biological, and computational systems.
Across recent editions of the course, students have investigated a broad range of topics, including chaotic electronic circuits, synchronization, chaos-based communication, stochastic resonance, microfluidic mixing, robotic control, cardiac rhythm models, compartmental models in epidemiology, satellite attitude control, and the three-body problem.
The projects illustrate how concepts such as bifurcations, strange attractors, Lyapunov exponents, Poincaré maps, multistability, nonlinear oscillations, sensitivity to initial conditions, and nonlinear control can be used to analyze systems that arise in electronics, robotics, fluids, biology, space systems, communication, and public-health modeling.
Recent Spring 2026 projects included a physical implementation of Chua’s circuit with synchronization and chaos-based communication, chaotic mixing in microfluids, nonlinear control of a flexible robotic system, a modified fourth-order Chua circuit, stochastic resonance with chaotic noise, and nonlinear cardiac rhythm models. These projects combined simulations, phase-space analysis, electronic experiments, and system-level modeling.
Previous Spring 2025 projects further broadened the scope, with student work on compartmental models in epidemiology, satellite attitude control, and the circular restricted three-body problem. These examples show how nonlinear dynamics provides a common mathematical language for systems that may appear very different at first sight.
Several projects combined numerical simulation with experimental or practical implementations, including breadboard demonstrations of chaotic circuits, stochastic-resonance experiments using microcontrollers, satellite attitude-control simulations, and orbital-dynamics visualizations.
The diversity of topics reflects one of the strengths of nonlinear dynamics: the same mathematical tools can help interpret systems ranging from electronic circuits and robotic motion to fluid mixing, biological rhythms, infectious disease models, and orbital mechanics.
Congratulations to the students for taking on ambitious topics and for bringing nonlinear dynamics to life through simulations, experiments, and presentations.
