Synchronization of non-weakly coupled aeroelastic oscillators

Synchronized oscillators are ubiquitous in nature and engineering. Despite several models that have been proposed to treat synchronized oscillators beyond weak coupling, the widely accepted paradigm holds that synchronization occurs due to weak interactions between oscillating objects, hence limiting the predictive power of such models to the weak coupling limit. Here, we report a theoretical modeling and experimental observation of a synchronized pair of non-weakly coupled aeroelastic oscillators. We find quantitative agreement between the experiments and our theoretical higher-order phase model of non-weak coupling. Our results establish that synchronization experiments can be accurately reproduced and interpreted by theoretical modeling of non-weakly coupled oscillators, extending the range of validity and prediction power of theoretical phase models beyond the weak coupling limit.