P3_9 Modelling Spider-Man’s Swing as an Elastic Pendulum

Abstract

We investigate an elastic pendulum to see if it could be used to model the trajectory of a particular Spider-Man swing. Our aim is not to find exact parameters, but rather to see if such a swing could be modelled in this way. We find that for reasonable constants (e.g. k ∼ 30 Nm−1 ) and initial velocities ˙r = 5 ms−1 and ˙θ = 1 rads−1 , it might be a useful way to describe this swing.