Numerical and analytical study of the motion of Maxwell’s pendulum

The article considers the problem of the stability of the vertical position of a Maxwell pendulum during its periodic up-down movements. Two types of transition movements are considered: “stop” — occurs when the body of the pendulum in its highest position on the string (during its “standard” upward movement) stops for a moment; “two-link pendulum” — occurs when the entire thread from the body of the pendulum is selected (the lowest position of the body on the thread during its “standard” downward movement), and the body is forced to rotate relative to the thread around the point of its attachment to the body. It is shown that for any values of the pendulum parameters, this position is unstable in the sense that oscillations of the thread around the vertical of finite amplitude occur in the system for arbitrarily small initial deviations. In addition, it has been established that no shock phenomena occur during the movement of the Maxwell pendulum, and the model of this pendulum itself, with the values of its parameters often used in the literature, is incorrect according to Hadamard. In this work, it is shown that the vertical position of the pendulum threads during the indicated oscillatory movements of the body along the threads for any non-degenerate values of the parameters of the Maxwell pendulum is always unstable in the above sense. Moreover, this instability is caused precisely by transitional movements of the 2nd type. In this work, it is further shown that no jumps in speeds or accelerations (due to which shocks or “jerks” in the tension of the threads can occur) do not occur during the indicated movements of the Maxwell pendulum model under consideration. In our opinion, the “jerks” observed in the experiments are due to other reasons, for example, the technical imperfection of the instruments on which the experiments were carried out.