Our physical pendulum setup is pictured below:
From a different angle:
In the top picture above, the signal amplifier appears on the left, right next to the amplitude arm. In the middle, the pendulum sits atop its post. In the bottom picture, the driver wheel behind the pendulum can be seen. The springs are connected to the driver wheel by black thread. The point mass, or brass cylinder, can be seen clearer in the bottom picture. This brass piece makes the disk connected to the drive wheel an actual pendulum due to the restoring torque gravity exerts on it. The drive wheel can be seen clearest behind the grey disk in the picture below:
This side view accentuates the point mass (golden colored rod perpendicular to grey disk) comprising the pendulum. Also, right behind the vertical disk is the drive wheel. It is a black disk structure. To exert a force on the drive wheel, we used a computer to output a signal at a specific DC voltage that drove a lever arm at a certain angular frequency. The lever arm and amplifier can be seen below:
The power amplifier (top left) amplified the signal from the computer in order to drive the arm directly to the right of it in the picture. The lever arm has a string attached to it that is wrapped around the drive wheel behind the disk pendulum. Finally, here is a picture of the pendulum itself:
The pendulum is merely comprised of a grey disk with a brass point mass on the end which experiences a restoring torque due to gravity. This concludes our experimental setup section, to see how all of these different parts combine to make a pendulum go crazy with chaos proceed to the Mathmatical modeling section of this report!
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