Consider a circular drum which is two feet in diameter, and has a maximum vertical displacement of 0.50 inches. The drum is struck dead center forcing the maximum vertical displacement. Time is measured from the instant the drum stick breaks contact with the drum head, and the drum reaches a maximum positive displacement 0.2 seconds after the drum is struck. Fix the origin at the center of the drum, with the undisturbed drum head in the xy-plane.
At t=0 the drum is at its maximum negative vertical displacement. It looks like a bowl, and curves smoothly to the sides of the circular drum head, which are fixed at z=0. Since the drum reaches its maximum positive displacement 0.2 seconds later, at t=0.1 seconds the drum head is half way between its minimum and maximum. Thus the drum would be perfectly flat. At t=0.2 seconds the drum has reached its maximum positive vertical displacement so that the it would look like an upside down bowl, much like an inversion of the drum head at t=0 seconds.
The drum, over time, will oscillate between the states described (and illustrated) in part 1.
This cross-section is the profile of the drum head along the y axis at t=0
, and would look the graph below.
In time, the cross-section would flatten, and then bulge upward. As t
increases beyond t=0.2 seconds the bulge will flatten, depress and
oscillate back and fourth.
At x=0, y=0, we are looking at the height of the center of the drum head
over time. From part 1 the drum head starts at it's maximum negative
vertical displacement, at t=0.1 seconds the drum head is flat, and at t=0.2 seconds the drum head has reached it's maximum positive vertical
displacement. This trend will continue, at t=0.3 seconds the drum head
will be flat, and at t=0.4 the drum head will be back where it started at
a maximum negative vertical displacement. Thus the center oscillates from -0.5 inches to 0.5 inches with a period of 0.4 seconds, so it would
look like , which is shown below.
A cross-section with and fixed looks at how the displacement changes in time at the point . As we consider points closer to the edge of the drum (x=0) the amplitude should decrease. The point (1,0) is fixed at z=0, thus the amplitude should be zero at (1,0). The cross-sections for the points (0.25,0), (0.5,0), (0.75,0), and (1,0) are drawn below.
We already know that z=f(x,y,t) should oscillate in time like (see part 3c,d) the remaining part is to describe the amplitude as a function of x and y. This should have circular symmetry with a maximum amplitude at (0,0) and should decrease to zero amplitude at the drums edge ( ). The maximum displacement is 0.5 inches and the function should start at the maximum negative displacement. Two such functions are:
and
Where x and y are measured in feet and the resulting amplitude is measured in inches. So the corresponding functions to describe the motion of the drum head would be:
and
One way is to include an exponential (in time) damping term in the amplitude: . The first function would become
and the cross section for the middle of the drum (x=0 and y=0) would be