CRISIS-INDUCED INTERMITTENCY AND MELNIKOV SCALE FACTOR

We study the post-critical behavior of a perturbed bistable Hamiltonia n system to which the Melnikov approach is applicable under the assump tion that the perturbation is asymptotically small. We examine the cas e of perturbations that are sufficiently large to cause chaotic transp ort between phase space regions associated with the system's potential wells. The main results are: (1) a small additional harmonic excitati on can cause substantial changes in the system's mean residence time, and (2) the dependence of the magnitude of these changes on the additi onal excitation's frequency is similar to the dependence on frequency of the system's Melnikov scale factor. We discuss the relevance of the se results to the design of efficient, Melnikov-based open loop contro ls aimed at increasing the mean residence time for the stochastically excited counterpart of the system.