Question

This python program is supposed to simulate an object being thrown off a 50 meter building, with some initial velocity and constant gravitational acceleration.
I am using arrays to store the different components, but when it’s time to do my computations, my resulting matrix is not turning out like it should. In fact, the resulting matrix is for the most part still empty. What could be causing this problem?

 x = z = vz = vy = ax = ay = time = 0.0
 y = 50 #Initial Height: 50 meters
 vx = 25 #Initial velocity in the x direction: 25 m/s
 az = -9.8 #Constant acceleration in the z direction: -9.8 m/s^2
 deltaTime = .000001

 #Initializes a matrix with 3 columns and 1000 rows for each column: Will hold the corresponding x,y,z coordinate of the particle at time t
 positionMatrix = [[None]*1000 for x in range(3)] 

 posArray = [x, y, z] 
 velArray = [vx, vy, vz] 
 accArray = [ax, ay, az]
 timeArray = [i*deltaTime for i in range(1000)]

 j = 1 #time increment

 for j in range (1,500): #j is the time increment
     for i in range (1,3): #i is each component (x, y, z)

         #x = x + vx*time + .5*ax*(time*time); #y = y + vy*time + .5*ay*(time*time); #z =    z + vz*time + .5*az*(time*time)
         positionMatrix[i][j] = posArray[i] + velArray[i] * timeArray[j] +  1/2*accArray[i] * timeArray[j] * timeArray[j]
         print(positionMatrix)

Answer 1

Your ranges are wrong – posArray is indexed from 0 to 2 (so posArray[0] = x, posArray[1] = y, posArray[2] = z). Also, you’re printing out the matrix every time, so you’ll see lots of None there.

You also put 1000 rows in the array, but then only fill 500 of them in.

You should replace the last block of code with:

 for j in range (1000):
     for i in range (3):
         positionMatrix[i][j] = posArray[i] + velArray[i] * timeArray[j] +  1/2*accArray[i] * timeArray[j] * timeArray[j]

 print(positionMatrix)