  We, herein, present a new model based on the framework of synchronization to
describe a thermoacoustic system and capture the multiple bifurcations that
such a system undergoes. Instead of applying flame describing function to
depict the unsteady heat release rate as the flame's response to acoustic
perturbation, the new model considers the acoustic field and the unsteady heat
release rate as a pair of nonlinearly coupled damped oscillators. By varying
the coupling strength, multiple dynamical behaviors, including limit cycle
oscillation, quasi-periodic oscillation, strange nonchaos, and chaos can be
captured. Furthermore, the model was able to qualitatively replicate the
different behaviors of a laminar thermoacoustic system observed in experiments
by Kabiraj et al.~[Chaos 22, 023129 (2012)]. By analyzing the temporal
variation of the phase difference between heat release rate oscillations and
pressure oscillations under different dynamical states, we show that the
characteristics of the dynamical states depend on the nature of synchronization
between the two signals, which is consistent with previous experimental
findings.
