Next: Energy
Up: Second Order Differential Equations
Previous: Project


The Realistic Pendulum

Applying Newton's second law for rotations to a pendulum results in a nonlinear second order differential equation,

If the displacement is small we can set (we use a Taylor series of first order) and get our old friend, the harmonic oscillator.

However, there is no problem solving the exact differential equation numerically. We just take the Runge-Kutta algorithm and include the sine function in the definition of the derivatives, resulting in the following set of equations.



Next: Energy
Up: Second Order Differential Equations
Previous: Project