Superlinear Angular Momentum in Reaction Wheels

The simulator in action

This is my final project for PHYS 350 at UBC, wherein I develop several mathematical models of expanding reaciton wheels. It is written in the context of robot control systems, however the primary focus is on the lagrangian formalism used to describe such a system.

Usage

To run the simulation, you must first install SFML, the Crystal compiler, and shards (the Crystal package manager). In the project directory, run shards install to install dependencies, then run crystal run src/reaction-wheel.cr to launch the visualizer. Graphing is done with Ishi, which requires gnuplot to be installed on your system.

As implied in the instructions above, reaction-wheel.cr is what orchestrates the simulation - if you want to tamper with this project, that's likely the place to do so.

Note

At the time of writing this, I'm currently juggling multiple final exams and this project. Because this simulation was just something I made for my own interest, it is poorly documented (although the code is not particularly complex).