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Re: funny capacitor (URL)



Ludwik,
Back in the first week of March, 1999 this type of problem was discussed
in a different context here on Phys-L. Shortly thereafter I produced a
program to do just what you're doing, but using MathCad. But the other
difference I want to point out is that I omitted the container (really
doing a different problem: a set of localized conductors in unbounded
space). I defined the potentials only on the conductors and then applied
the averaging algorithm to all other cells - including the boundaries of
the region of calculation. This will give a valid solution with the
potential tending toward zero for cells far removed from the localized set
of conductors. I iterated the solution until the numbers stopped changing
to with some small limit.

Just try removing your container and see what happens.

Bob Sciamanda
Physics, Edinboro Univ of PA (em)
trebor@velocity.net
http://www.velocity.net/~trebor
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ludwik Kowalski" <KowalskiL@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2001 01:45 PM
Subject: Re: funny capacitor (URL)


I corrected obvious mistakes in the tutorial posted earlier. The
numbers in the narrative now match the numbers in the tables.
The corrected version is shown below. It has the HTML tags
because I am about to post it on my website. Feel free to
cut-and-paste it to your site for students.
********************************

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>TUTORIAL </TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<center><H1> ELECTROSTATICS WITHOUT CALCULUS
</H1><H3></center>
<P>
The most interesting problems of electrostatics used to be
inaccessible to students unfamiliar with advanced calculus.
Here are typical problems: