Date

6-2012

Degree Name

BS in Aerospace Engineering

Department

Aerospace Engineering Department

Advisor(s)

David Marshall

Abstract

This paper outlines the setup and creation of an object-oriented N-body simulator as part of a continued project to explore physical phenomenon and human-computer natural interaction technologies. The tools and processes required to build an N-body simulator are also included. Several integrators were evaluated based on their ability to maintain system energy The 2nd order integrator Verlet and 3rd order integrator Hermite algorithms had the greatest accuracy to model large-scale N-body dynamics for their given computation time. Other algorithms required significantly shorter time steps to achieve similar short-term accuracy. At present, NOMS can reasonably simulate 10,000 particles at less than one minute per iteration.