Constant Acceleration Population

I couldn't sleep this morning. Woke up around 4am or so and just couldn't get my mind back to rest. That will make for a less than ideal day, but it had one significant positive. My brain was working on some useful ideas. The main one, and the one that finally pulled me out of bed to code it up, was to add a constant acceleration to my BasicPopulation. That sentence probably needs a bit of explanation.

My simulation code is rather modular. One of the more significant modules is an element called a population. The population keeps track of the bodies in the simulation and has logic in it to handle their movement, find collision times, process collisions, etc. I basically have two populations that I use. My ring simulations use what I call the GCPopulation. GC stands for guiding center. In this population, the particles don't move on straight lines. Instead, they follow guiding center motion which is a first order analytic solution to Hill's equations. This complicates collision finding, but has benefits that make it well worth while otherwise. Basically, the gravity of Saturn is implicit.

For general research purposes when I want to look at other types of systems I have created a "BasicPopulation". In this population particles travel on straight lines between collisions in the middle of a time step. I was using this for the simulations for Josh and I had a second force of constant acceleration in addition to the collision forcing.

This constant acceleration causes some issues numerically that are best resolved by taking small time steps. This is common in numerical integrations. The integration is more accurate if you take smaller time steps. The simulation also really grinds at the end when the particles are sitting right on top of one another in a close packed configuration. Part of the reason it grinds in this configuration is that the gravity force is applied as a kick at the beginning of the time step and all the particles are given a downward motion which then has to be canceled out by collisions propagating back up through them.

The thing about constant acceleration is that you really don't need a numerical integrator. There is a nice analytic solution to the motion, it is a parabola. So the idea was to create a population that uses that motion somewhat like the GCPopulation uses guiding center motion. When I turned this around in my head a bit (and didn't fall back asleep as a result) I realized that I didn't even need a new population. It's an easy addition to the BasicPopulation. How easy? Turns out to be one line. It was a little harder to make it so one other element of the simulation would work, but that wasn't too bad either. Now I'm testing it.

Why do I care? My hope is that at this will have a very helpful impact on the end of the simulation when all the particles are tight packed. Without the constant acceleration force the particles won't all be given a kick in the downward direction. Instead, they will follow a true parabola with a derivative of zero at apex. This should provide much nicer numerical behavior at that point and allow me to take larger time steps because I don't have to worry about numerical accuracy of the integration.

Now if I can just get that locking graph completed so I can drop a marble on the final configuration.