The Chebyshev spectral continuous time approximation for periodic delay differential equations

In this paper, the approximation technique proposed in [1] for converting a system of constant-coefficient delay differential equations (DDEs) into a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) using pseudospectral differencing is applied to both constant and periodic systems of DDEs. Specifically, the use of Chebyshev spectral collocation is proposed in order to obtain the "spectral accurac" convergence behavior shown in [1], The proposed technique is used to study the stability of first and second order constant coefficient DDEs with one or two fixed delays with or without cubic nonlinearity and parametric sinusoidal excitation, as well as of the delayed Mathieu's equation. In all the examples, the results of the approximation by the proposed method show good agreement with either analytical results, or the results obtained before by other reliable approximation methods. In particular, the greater accuracy and convergence properties of this method compared to the finite difference-based continuous time approximation proposed recently in [2] is shown.