Equivalence of MTS and CMR methods associated with the normal form of Hopf bifurcation for delayed reaction–diffusion equations

In this paper, we prove the equivalence of the multiple time scales (MTS) method and the center manifold reduction (CMR) method for deriving the normal form of Hopf bifurcation for delayed reaction–diffusion equations. First, we generalize the MTS method associated with functional differential equations to delayed reaction–diffusion equation for solving the normal form of Hopf bifurcation. This provides a user-friendly approach of analyzing the stability of time-periodic solutions, particularly, for the engineering researchers who are not familiar with CMR method. Second, we outline the CMR method associated with the computation of normal form of Hopf bifurcation for delayed reaction–diffusion equations. Third, we prove that the two methods can derive equivalent up to the third order normal form of Hopf bifurcation. Finally, different types of examples are presented, such as reaction–diffusion equations with Neumann boundary condition and Dirichlet boundary conditions, single delay and two delays, spatially homogeneous and spatially inhomogeneous periodic solutions. We obtain the equivalent Hopf bifurcation normal forms results derived by using the CMR and MTS methods for above examples, respectively.