On the purposeful coarsening of smooth vector fields

This paper argues for the possibility of purposely approximating smooth vector fields with highly localized variability in terms of piecewise smooth vector fields for the purpose of analyzing the bifurcation characteristics of the corresponding dynamical systems. Here, emphasis is placed on the changes in system response that result as a periodic trajectory begins to incorporate a brief flow segment in the region of high variability under variations in some system parameter. In particular, it is shown that tools from the theory of grazing bifurcations in piecewise-smooth systems may be employed to qualitatively predict the bifurcation scenario associated with such a transition both in terms of the shape of the branch of periodic trajectories and in terms of the persistence of a local attractor in the vicinity of the original periodic trajectory.