|The Double Pendulum|
Animated gif (109kB) showing solution of the double pendulum equations for particular initial conditions.
The double pendulum is an example of a simple dynamical system that
complex behaviour, including chaos. It consists of two point masses at the
end of light rods. Each mass plus rod is a regular simple pendulum, and the
two pendula are joined together and the system is free to oscillate in a
page has an excellent, detailed description of the dynamical
of the double pendulum, including derivation of the equations of motion
Lagrangian formalism. For the purposes of numerical solution the
equations of motion may be written in the standard form
The left panel shows two animated gifs illustrating solution of these equations for one kilogram pendulum masses and one metre pendulum lengths, for the indicated times in seconds (the two gifs may take some time to load - they are 109kB and 239kB respectively). The second gif illustrates sensitivity to initial conditions: the pendulum is started from two initial configurations differing by 0.001 degrees in the angle of the second mass.
The C code used to solve the equations is here. Fourth order Runge-Kutta is used to integrate the ODEs. It should be noted that this approach does not give accurate solutions for long times for equations such as these - symplectic integrators should be used. (Or so the applied mathematicians tell me.)
|Page maintained by m.wheatland (at) physics.usyd.edu.au||Page last updated Thursday, 18-Sep-2014 15:33:34 AEST|