Numerical findings of natural convection flows in a trapezoidal cavity are reported in this study. This study focuses on the shift from symmetric steady to chaotic flow within the cavity. This cavity has a heated bottom wall, a cooled top wall, and adiabatic inclined sidewalls. The unsteady natural convection flows occurring within the cavity are numerically simulated using the finite volume (FV) method. The fluid used in the study is air, and the calculations are performed for different dimensionless parameters, including the Prandtl number (Pr), which is kept constant at 0.71, while varying the Rayleigh numbers (Ra) from 100 to 108 and using a fixed aspect ratio (AR) of 0.5. This study focuses on the effect of the Rayleigh numbers on the transition to chaos. In the transition to chaos, a number of bifurcations occur. The first primary transition is found from the steady symmetric to the steady asymmetric stage, known as a pitchfork bifurcation. The second leading transition is found from a steady asymmetric to an unsteady periodic stage, known as Hopf bifurcation. Another prominent bifurcation happens on the changeover of the unsteady flow from the periodic to the chaotic stage. The attractor bifurcates from a stable fixed point to a limit cycle for the Rayleigh numbers between 4 × 106 and 5 × 106. A spectral analysis and the largest Lyapunov exponents are analyzed to investigate the natural convection flows during the shift from periodic to chaos. Moreover, the cavity’s heat transfers are computed for various regimes. The cavity’s flow phenomena are measured and verified.

With a view to obtaining the transient response of the system where triply eigenvalues are equal and another is distinct, we have considered a fourth order more critically damped nonlinear systems, and enquired into analytical approximate solution in this paper. We have also suggested that the results obtained by the proposed method correspond to the numerical solutions obtained by the fourth order Runge-Kutta method satisfactorily.

This article examines a fifth order critically damped nonlinearsystem in the case of small equal eigenvalues and tries to find out an asymptotic solution. This paper suggests that the solutions obtained by the perturbation techniques based on modified Krylov-Bogoliubov-Mitropoloskii (KBM) method is consistent with the numerical solutions obtained by the fourth order Runge-Kutta method.

In this article, we have considered a fifth order critically damped nonlinear differential system, and studied the asymptotic solutions when two of the eigenvalues are large and equal and the other eigenvalues are distinct. In this study, we have found that the approximate results obtained by the modified KBM method corresponds with those obtained by the numerical method using Mathematica.