Driven and coupled harmonic oscillators w/o friction

This is an animation that I created using PyGame (and its functionality to export frames to jpeg files) and mencoder (for video generation).

The animation shows a network of 7x8 masses in 2D, connected through springs.
One of those masses is driven at a constant frequency, the four corner masses were made immovable and the rest of the masses just interacts through the springs.

On the bottom of the screen you can see kinetic and potential energy graphed, as well the sum of both.




In this video there is no friction at all! I also rendered a version using small friction, which shows a completely different behavior!


The script that was used was created (by myself) using Python and the modules Numeric, PyGame, Math and some other basics for handling command line options.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• masses
• springs
• physics
• network
• oscillation
• harmonic
• oscillator
• animation
• pygame
• python
• simulation