Forced Simple Harmonic Oscillator with a Triangular Forcing Function

Display vectors:
None Velocity Acceleration
Display values:
None Energy Position Velocity Acceleration

Initial position= m. Initial velocity= m/s. Spring constant= N/m. Damping= kg/s.

Force amplitude (f0)= N. Force angular frequency (omega)= rad/s.

The units in the animation are MKS (meters, kilograms, and seconds). The mass is 1 kg. The graph of Fourier terms displays only the lowest four harmonics. The Fourier approximation to the triangle function and the analytic solution also include only the first four harmonics.

Note: setting the forcing frequency to the resonant frequency AND setting the damping to zero will result in a divide-by-zero.

By Robert Johnson, using the Physlet Animator and dataGraph classes from Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni.