Chaos · classical mechanics

Driven Quadruple Pendulum

Driven Quadruple Pendulum
fig. Driven Quadruple Pendulum

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A driven, damped pendulum is about the simplest thing that goes chaotic, and this one has four coupled segments. I derived the equations of motion, wrote a custom RK4 integrator, and used phase portraits, Poincare sections, and Lyapunov divergence to watch the route into chaos as the drive turns up. Co-authored with Soham Bhar for a computational physics course.

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