14: Springs and Things

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The computational tools you have learned so far make up a versatile toolkit for modeling physical systems described by first- and second-order differential equations and systems of equations.

With ode45 you can compute the state variables of these systems as they change over time. By varying the parameters of the model, you can see what effect they have on the results. Then you can use fminsearch and fzero to find minimums, maximums, and places where the outputs pass through zero.

These tools are all you need to solve a lot of problems, so this chapter doesn’t present new computational tools (whew!). Instead, we’ll look at some different physical systems and some forces we haven’t dealt with yet, including spring forces and universal gravitation.

The examples in this chapter are a little more open-ended than the previous ones. I will present a motivating problem and some background information, and you will have a chance to implement the models as exercises.