Project Assignment Outline PDF: project_assignment.pdf
This project relates to my CISC 480: Senior Capstone course because it was the most difficult assignment I worked on during my Methods of Computational Physics course at the University of St. Thomas. As part of the Physics (B.S.) curriculum, this course involved elements of computer science including: the implementation of differential equations to model the motion of multiple bodies, Runge-Kutta 4th order technique for differential equation solving, and Object-Oriented prorgramming methodologies.
NOTE: All code in this repository has been cleaned up since the completion of this course to be featured in my senior portfolio.
The main purpose of this project is to demonstrate the implementation of Pygame, a Python package for integrated animation and data visualization. By using a multi-body orbital simulation program, we can track the movement of multiple bodies through a simulation space (i.e. our Solar System).
- $git clone https://github.com/benfrey/phys325-orbital-system
- $cd phys325-orbital-system
- $pip install -r requirements.txt
- $python OrbitDriver.py
NOTE: I am using Python 3.9.7 and pip 21.2.4 at the time of writing this.
First, the system state is calculated for 600 simulation steps. The calculation process is tracked by the program:
Next, the simulation results are statically drawn to a figure on screen with Matplotlib:
Finally, once exiting the static figure, the simulation results are animated to the screen with Pygame:
