Double (or triple) and sort

Here’s a sequence I keep mulling over in my head:

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 23, 46, 29, 58, 116, 223, 446, …

Does it grow without bound? First we should specify what it is. Each number is double the one before, but with the digits sorted into ascending order. The doubling makes the number larger… but the sorting makes it smaller, so perhaps this sequence tops out somewhere?

This sequence actually becomes periodic pretty quickly. The full sequence is:

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 23, 46, 29, 58, 116, 223, 446, 289, 578, 1156, 1223, 2446, 2489, 4789, 5789, 11578, 12356, 12247, 24449, 48889, 77789, 155578, 111356, 122227, 244445, 48889, …
and then it repeats with period 6. The key is in the final step: once we get a number that ends with 5, there’s a 0 in its double so the next term is actually shorter. (It is surprisingly hard to keep the mental arithmetic straight to the point where I can do this in my head.) There are other such loops: if you start with 3 you eventually reach

69, 138, 267, 345, 69, …

(note that everything stays divisible by 3 here!). If you start with 7 you get to

167, 334, 668, 1336, 2267, 3445, 689, 1378, 2567, 1345, 269, 358, 167, …

and if you start with 9 you get to

9, 18, 36, 27, 45, 9, …

And there’s a series of these sequences. Every number in that period-6 loop that you reach if you start with 1 has a repeated digit, and you can have less or more of those:

49, 89, 178, 356, 127, 245, 49, …
489, 789, 1578, 1356, 1227, 2445, 489, …
4889, 7789, 15578, 11356, 12227, 24445, 4889, …

The structure is quite a bit richer than the triple-and-sort sequence, presumably because divisibility by three “plays well” with rearranging digits. There, as far as I can tell, no matter what number you start with you end up with 45. (Tripling that give 135, tripling again gives 405, which sorts back to 45.) The reason for this seems to be that any repeated digits, when tripled, give you repeated 3s or 6s, and tripling those gives repeated 0s. For example, consider the start number 9261632697:

• Tripling gives 27784898091 – which incidentally has a zero – and sorting that gives 1247788899.
• Tripling again gives 3743366697 – the repeated 7s and 8s “turn into” repeated 3s and 6s — and sorting gives 3334666779.
• At this point everything collapses – tripling gives 10004000337, and sorting gives 13347.
• Another collapsing step: 13347 × 3 = 40041, which sorts to 144.
• The remainder of the sequence is uninteresting:  234, 27, 18, 45, 135, 45, 135, …

This is the “typical” behavior – but it’s a bit surprising to me that it always works. I suspect a proof would be in terms of vectors that show the number of each digit, rather than with the raw numbers themselves.