Copyright © 2013 Yanqin Xiong and Maoan Han. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper concerns limit cycle bifurcations by perturbing a piecewise linear Hamiltonian system. We first obtain all phase portraits of the unperturbed system having at least one family of periodic orbits. By using the first-order Melnikov function of the piecewise near-Hamiltonian system, we investigate the maximal number of limit cycles that bifurcate from a global center up to first order of .