Stability of damped Hill's equation

You will find the information needed for this project in the form of a PDF document. The particular Hill's equation you are going to look at is
y'' + k y' + (a + e * cos(x))/(1 + e * cos(x)) y = 0
where y=y(x).

The objective

For k=.2, find a combination of the positive parameters a and e for which the system is unstable. Demonstrate the instability by plotting the solution.

The strategy

You may start from the code produced in class for the case of k=0 (undamped case).


Marek Rychlik <rychlik@u.arizona.edu>
Last modified: Sun Nov 30 20:14:37 MST 2003