Damped Harmonic Oscillation

In the previous chapter, we encountered a number of energy conserving physical

systems that exhibit simple harmonic oscillation about a stable equilibrium state. One
of the main features of such oscillation is that, once excited, it never dies away.
However, the majority of the oscillatory systems that we encounter in everyday life
suffer some sort of irreversible energy loss while they are in motion--due, for instance,
to frictional or viscous heat generation. We would therefore expect oscillations excited
in such systems to eventually be damped away. Let us examine an example of a
damped oscillatory system.
Consider the mass-spring system discussed in Section 2.1. Suppose that, as it slides
over the horizontal surface, the mass is subject to a frictional damping force that
opposes its motion, and is directly proportional to its instantaneous velocity. It follows
that the net force acting on the mass when its instantaneous displacement is
the form

takes

(62)

where
is the mass,
the spring force constant, and
a constant
(with the dimensions of angular frequency) that parameterizes the strength of the
damping. The time evolution equation of the system thus becomes [cf., Equation (2)]
(63)

where
is the undamped oscillation frequency [cf., Equation (6)]. We
shall refer to the preceding equation as the damped harmonic oscillator equation.
Let us search for a solution to Equation (63) of the form
(64)

where
,
,
, and are all constants. By analogy with the
discussion in Section 2.1, we can interpret the preceding solution as a periodic
oscillation, of fixed angular frequency
decays exponentially in time as

, and phase angle

, whose amplitude

. It can be demonstrated that

(65)
(66)

Hence, Equation (63) becomes

0
(67)

The only way that the preceding equation can be satisfied at all times is if the
(constant) coefficients of
separately equate to zero, so that

and
(68)
(69)

These equations can be solved to give

(70)

and
(71)

Thus, the solution to the damped harmonic oscillator equation is written

(72)

assuming that
(because
cannot be negative). We conclude
that the effect of a relatively small amount of damping, parameterized by the damping
constant , on a system that exhibits simple harmonic oscillation about a stable
equilibrium state is to reduce the angular frequency of the oscillation from its
undamped value

to

, and to cause the amplitude of the

oscillation to decay exponentially in time at the rate

. This modified type of
oscillation, which we shall refer to as damped harmonic oscillation, is illustrated in
Figure 7. [Here,

, whereas the dashed lines show

, and

. The solid line shows

.] Incidentally, if the damping is sufficiently

large that
(which we shall assume not to be the case) then the system does
not oscillate at all, and any motion simply decays away exponentially in time. (See
Exercise 7.)

Figure 7: Damped harmonic oscillation.

Although the angular frequency,

, and decay rate,
, of the damped harmonic
oscillation specified in Equation (72) are determined by the constants appearing in the
damped harmonic oscillator equation, (63), the initial amplitude,
angle,
if

, and the phase

, of the oscillation are determined by the initial conditions. In fact,

and

then it follows from Equation (72) that

(73)
(74)

giving
(75)

(76)

The damped harmonic oscillator equation is a linear differential equation. In other

words, if

is a solution then so is

, where

is an arbitrary constant. It

follows that the solutions of this equation are superposable, so that if

and

are two solutions corresponding to different initial conditions then

a third solution, where

and

is

are arbitrary constants.

Multiplying the damped harmonic oscillator equation, (63), by

, we obtain
(77)

which can be rearranged to give

(78)

where
(79)

is the total energy of the system: that is, the sum of the kinetic and potential energies.
Because the right-hand side of (78) cannot be positive, and is only zero when the
system is stationary, the total energy is not a conserved quantity, but instead decays
monotonically in time due to the action of the damping. The net rate at which the
force (62) does work on the mass is
(80)

The spring force (i.e., the first term on the right-hand side) does negative work on the
mass (i.e., it reduces the system kinetic energy) when and are of the same sign,
and does positive work when they are of the opposite sign. It can be demonstrated
that, on average, the spring force does no net work on the mass during an oscillation
cycle. The damping force, on the other hand, (i.e., the second term on the right-hand
side) always does negative work on the mass, and, therefore, always acts to reduce the
system kinetic energy.