A Ski Slope
By Franceso Onorato
This worksheet will:
- Solve a set of coupled ODEs taken from Lorenz's book, "The Essence of Chaos", to describe the motion of a frictionless board as it moves down an infinite-sloped surface of sinusoidal humps
- Exhibit relevancy for many industries, specifically in academia
- Perform ordinary differential equations (ODEs), RKadapt, and Runge Kutta 4th order solvers with adaptive time step
This worksheet sets up a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. A matrix of the functions for the x/y positions and velocities is defined. It's then passed to the RKadapt function. The x/y positions are plotted with a 3D plot of the sinusoidal humps, marking the trajectory of the board as it travels through the humps. In practical terms, this can be thought of as the motion of a set of skis going down a mountain. Step by step notation, formulas, equations, graphs, images, and solutions are all provided in this worksheet to aid you.
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