Time Evolution of a Four-Spring Three-Mass System

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Coupled spring systems are fun and ubiquitous: in playgrounds, cars, and experimental physics lectures at universities. This Demonstration simulates the time evolution of three masses coupled with four springs. The left end of the first spring and the right end of the last spring are fixed.
Contributed by: Michael Trott (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
maximal time — maximal evolution time
number of time slices — the number of spring‐mass configurations to show
initial position/velocity mass — initial position (horizontal) and velocity (vertical) of the
point mass
Permanent Citation
"Time Evolution of a Four-Spring Three-Mass System"
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TimeEvolutionOfAFourSpringThreeMassSystem/
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Published: March 7 2011