Copyright © 2012 Sandile S. Motsa and Precious Sibanda. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We present a novel application of the successive linearisation method to the classical Van der Pol and Duffing oscillator equations. By recasting the governing equations as nonlinear eigenvalue problems we obtain accurate values of the frequency and amplitude. We demonstrate that the proposed method can be used to obtain the limit cycle and bifurcation diagrams of the governing equations. Comparison with exact and other results in the literature shows that the method is accurate and effective in finding solutions of nonlinear equations with oscillatory solutions, nonlinear eigenvalue problems, and other nonlinear problems with bifurcations.