Resumen de Bringing Ternary Energy Diagrams into the Mainstream
Bob Brazzle, Noah Bodine, Evan Roach, Selena Ensalaco
A ternary energy diagram is a powerful tool for computational physics, used to model systems with energy distributed among three or more forms. A single graph can be packed with thousands of individual data points, and can thus uniquely show a system’s changing energy distribution at the finest intervals of time or position, as well as its large-scale evolution. However, students won’t be able to fully realize the diagram’s value as an analysis tool unless it starts gaining more widespread use. In this article, we discuss modeling a system’s evolving energy distribution using ternary energy diagrams within computational simulations (spreadsheets and animations); we use the context of three physical scenarios and four readily available software tools: Excel, VPython (we use the GlowScript IDE), Desmos, and Jupyter Notebook. All of our simulations are available in the online appendix.
