Regular Article

Role of disorder on the signal amplification in an array of unidirectionally coupled MEMS

¹ Lab. Modelling and Simulation in Engineering, Biomimetics and Prototypes, Faculty of Science, University of Yaounde I, Box 812, Yaounde, Cameroon
² IFISC, Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos (CSIC-UIB), Campus Universitat Illes Balears, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
³ Applied Physics Research Group (APHY), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

^a e-mail: muriellevan@yahoo.fr

Received: 5 July 2018
Received in final form: 8 January 2019
Published online: 11 February 2019

Abstract

In a recent work, it was shown that sinusoidal signals are amplified in an array of unidirectionnally coupled MEMS and when the number of MEMS units was large enough, an instability leading to chaotic behavior was observed [M.V. Tchakui et al., Eur. Phys. J. B 89, 22 (2016)]. In this work, we explore the role of disorder in natural frequencies on the propagation and amplification of a signal in such an array. Considering a random Gaussian distribution of natural frequencies, it is found that for small disorder strength, the propagation takes place leading to oscillations in the array. Along the network, a decrease of oscillations amplitude is observed in proportion as the disorder strength grows up. With large coupling strength, the second transition to chaotic behavior is further postponed to a large MEMS rank up to its disappearance as the disorder strength increases in a broaden frequency range. For very large disorder strength the signal amplitude is damped to zero and there appears oscillations death.