Animation of a Simple Pendulum using the Euler-Cromer numerical method.

The oscillatory motion of a simple pendulum is simulated using Euler-Cromer method.

For small angles, equation of motion of a simple pendulum as derived from the Newton's second law is a simple ordinary differential equation which can be solved numerically. One such numerical technique is the Euler-Cromer method. In this code, oscillatory motion of a simple pendulum is animated using MATLAB inbuilt movie function. At the end , the code also calculates and animates the Kinetic Energy, Potential Energy and the Total energy as a function of time along with the motion of pendulum. The units are arbitrary and energies are normalized to 1. Axis are scaled accordingly to give a better view.

Ref: Computational Physics, 2nd Edition, Nicholas J. Giordano and Hisao Nakanishi,Prentice Hall, ISBN:0-13-146990-8