A smooth-piecewise model to the Cord Attractor

Abstract This paper reports a smooth-piecewise model to the Cord Attractor. The fact that the Cord Attractor has one real fixed point and two complex conjugate fixed points does not allow to use a technique based on the building of two affine subsystems, which requires at least two real fixed points [Chaos 16, 013115 (2006)]. In this work, we have presented a procedure to at least partially overcome this limitation using a virtual fixed point; the location of the fixed point is based on the topology of the original system. The switching function has been designed as a smooth function. The phase space and the local-finite largest Lyapunov exponent have been used to compare the resulting attractor with the original Cord Attractor.