Animated Pendulum

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Use the trigger to animate the pendulum. Change the gravity, pendulum length, maximum angle, and mass to see how they affect motion, period, and energy.

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Note that changing the initial conditions after the trigger has been hit will change the entire history of the pendulum's evolution.

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Contributed by: Joel Frederico and Rob Morris (March 2011)
Additional contributions by: Fernand Brunschwig
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


Snapshots


Details

In this Demonstration, all units are in MKS. The numerical solution is accurate and does not use the approximation of replacing by , which is only valid for small angles. Varying the mass changes the area of a disk with a physical density. Kinetic energy is not calculated directly, but from the principle of conservation of energy.



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