Coexistence of three heteroclinic cycles and chaos analyses for a class of 3D piecewise affine systems.

Our objective is to investigate the innovative dynamics of piecewise smooth systems with multiple discontinuous switching manifolds. This paper establishes the coexistence of heteroclinic cycles in a class of 3D piecewise affine systems with three switching manifolds through rigorous mathematical analysis. By constructing suitable Poincaré maps adjacent to heteroclinic cycles, we demonstrate the occurrence of two distinct types of horseshoes and show the conditions for the presence of chaotic invariant sets. A family of attractors that satisfy the criteria are presented using this technique. It is shown that the outcomes of numerical simulation accurately reflect those of our theoretical results.