ON THE DYNAMICS OF FLAIL

The purpose of this paper is to present a continous time, one (small) parameter theory of bifurcations which appear in two periodic orbits, the so called resonances 1/2 and 1/1, of an articulated, planar, frict ion less pendulum driven periodically, as shown in figure 1, a mechani cal system called flail. Basically, this model is characterized by two parameters: l(1)/l(2) and g/l(2) omega(2) and its equation of motion is given by (1.1). Here we consider the symmetric case where omega(2) = g/l(1) and we take (1.2) as our starting one-parameter differential equation.