Paul Martin
Waves in wood and vibrations of baseball bats

Wood is a complicated material: we model it as an elastic solid with cylindrical orthotropy. We consider the propagation of waves in slender (wooden) solids of revolution, such as a baseball bat. To solve the governing equations, we first scale the radial coordinate so as to map the bat onto a circular cylinder, and then we use the method of Frobenius (power series in the new radial variable). Before describing these calculations, we consider the simpler acoustic problem: sound waves in an axisymmetric tube with a slowly-varying cross-section. For this problem, we obtain a hierarchy of approximations, consisting of ordinary differential equations for the variation of some quantity along the tube. The simplest of these is usually known as Webster's horn equation.


Close this window