The phenomenon of chimera states in the systems of coupled, identical oscillators has attracted a great deal of recent theoretical and experimental interest. In such a state, different groups of oscillators can exhibit coexisting synchronous and incoherent behaviors despite homogeneous coupling. Here, considering the coupled pendula, we find another pattern, the so-called imperfect chimera state, which is characterized by a certain number of oscillators which escape from the synchronized chimera's cluster or behave differently than most of uncorrelated pendula. The escaped elements oscillate with different average frequencies (Poincare rotation number). We show that imperfect chimera can be realized in simple experiments with mechanical oscillators, namely Huygens clock. The mathematical model of our experiment shows that the observed chimera states are controlled by elementary dynamical equations derived from Newton's laws that are ubiquitous in many physical and engineering systems.

In this paper, the phenomena of hysteretic behaviour of friction force observed during experiments are discussed. On the basis of experimental and theoretical analyses, we argue that such behaviour can be considered as a representation of the system dynamics. According to this approach, a classification of friction models, with respect to their sensitivity on the system motion characteristic, is introduced. General friction modelling of the phenomena accompanying dry friction and a simple yet effective approach to capture the hysteretic effect are proposed. Finally, the experimental results are compared with the numerical simulations for the proposed friction model.

In this paper, we describe a periodically-forced oscillator with spatially-periodic damping. This system has an infinite number of coexisting nested attractors, including limit cycles, attracting tori, and strange attractors. We are aware of no similar example in the literature.