Imagine you have an ideal String of length L and would like to find an Equation that describes the oscillation of the string. Assuming the string is fixed at its ends and starts its motion in a known position f(x) the simplest assumption one can make is that the acceleration of each piece of the string is somewhat proportional to the curvature of the string as such:
We can express the considerations above in the following way:
The equation above is a partial differential equation (PDE) called the wave equation and can be used to model different phenomena such as vibrating strings and propagating waves.The constant term C has dimensions of m/s and can be interpreted as the wave speed.
It turns out that the problem above has the following general solution
The thing that strikes me about this equation is how powerful the solution is. To think about it, any function that has the argument x-ct or x+ct or a combination of both is a solution to the wave equation. This means that we can model a lot of different waves! Furthermore, as you could probably spot, the general solution is a combination of a wave travelling to the left and one travelling to the right.
Assuming let’s try the following solution
By implementing the equation in Python for a string of length 2pi and of speed 1 m/s we obtain the following animation:
The range of animation you can run is infinite. I tried out a couple of solutions:
Shortening the string, L=pi
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Trying out f(x-ct) + g(x+ct)= cos(x-ct)**3 + cos(x+ct)**3
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The solution
yields the following:
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Note how the resulting wave (cyan) is the sum of two cosine waves travelling in opposite directions.
What happens if you input the f(x-ct) term only and set g = 0? Basically what you get is a single travelling wave. The same happens if f = 0 and g = g(x+ct).
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Hope this was entertaining and helpful!
