Worked on the climber algorithms tonight.
For a ribbon segment without a climber or other ribbon furniture, the forces on the ribbon follow Hook's law, where the distance between the start point of two ribbon segments is compared against the initial segment length to compute the forces exhibited by the two segments on each other.
For a segment with a climber, I break the ribbon segment into two pieces, one 'below' the climber and the other 'above' the climber. If I can accurately state what the initial length of each of the pieces of the resulting ribbon is, then I can compute the forces on the ribbon segments and climber by calling the simple ribbon segment dynamics. I've already developed the method that checks when a climber has transitioned from one segment to the next. The missing pieces are computing the force that the climber applies to the ribbon, computing the amount of 'initial length' of the ribbon that the climber will cross in a simulation time increment, and to modify the old climber dynamics routine to the use the new methods.
Showing posts with label ribbon furniture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ribbon furniture. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Climbers and Other Furniture
Today I plan to work on the climbers. This is the one month anniversary of this blog and my space elevator simulation project.
I started to restructure the model to make this easier. The ribbonDynamics method computed the influence of one ribbon segment on the next, checked if the load on the segment caused it to break, and cleaned up the forces on the ribbon segment in preparation for the next iteration.
ribbonDynamics is being broken into several methods. The first is simpleSegDynamics, which can compute the influence of one ribbon segment on the next, presuming that nothing is attached to that ribbon segment. The logic to determine whether the segment has broken has also become a new method, and needs to be moved from the ribbon class to the ribbon segment class. A new method will be created to handle the case where there is a climber or something else attached to the ribbon. "Something else" can include things like a mass in geosynchronous orbit representing a station.
In the cell phone infrastructure business, the hardware out in the field, like the base stations associated with each tower, the base site controllers that coordinate multiple towers, and everything else required to connect with the publically switched telephone networks are referred to as "furniture". For the space elevator simulation, I will call anything hooked to the ribbon furniture as well.
I started to restructure the model to make this easier. The ribbonDynamics method computed the influence of one ribbon segment on the next, checked if the load on the segment caused it to break, and cleaned up the forces on the ribbon segment in preparation for the next iteration.
ribbonDynamics is being broken into several methods. The first is simpleSegDynamics, which can compute the influence of one ribbon segment on the next, presuming that nothing is attached to that ribbon segment. The logic to determine whether the segment has broken has also become a new method, and needs to be moved from the ribbon class to the ribbon segment class. A new method will be created to handle the case where there is a climber or something else attached to the ribbon. "Something else" can include things like a mass in geosynchronous orbit representing a station.
In the cell phone infrastructure business, the hardware out in the field, like the base stations associated with each tower, the base site controllers that coordinate multiple towers, and everything else required to connect with the publically switched telephone networks are referred to as "furniture". For the space elevator simulation, I will call anything hooked to the ribbon furniture as well.
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