The Effects Of A Stiffening Spring
The Effects of a Stiffening Spring
Authors: Clark, Karen E. and Sharon Hill
College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 379-382, 1999.
The authors consider a spring-mass system with n masses and ask what would happen if one of the springs stiffens to rigidity. That is, what happens if one of the spring constants approaches infinity. Intuition suggests that the two masses that are attached to the spring should move as one double mass. The authors provide the associated system of differential equations to show that this is indeed true.