Authors: Eric Miller, Nathan Yee
To quote the ModSim website:
In this project, you will be focusing on modeling of motion – “mechanical” systems, where “mechanical” refers to mechanics in thephysics sense, as opposed to the car repair sense. As with the lastproject, the mathematical models we’ll create for these will involvesystems of differential equations, and strictly speaking, we can stilldescribe the models using stocks and flows. So you could say thetypes of mathematical models you’ll be building are very similar. Onthe other hand, these systems tend to be a bit more complex mathematically, in that they often involve vector quantities instead of scalarquantities, and second order differential equations instead of firstorder. And, just as thermal systems benefitted from the introductionof system diagrams to graphically represent your abstraction, mechanical systems benefit from the introduction of free body diagram andcoordinate systems to represent the choices you make in abstraction.
Our project was to create a model of a trebuchet using Lagrangian mechanics, then use that to analyze the possiblity of a trebuchet-style theme park transportation system. As you would expect, this turns out to be a terrible idea, but it was quite fun to analyze.