Re: Help with mathematical function

[Stefan van der Walt]

Hi Robert

I assumed that the radius of the spiral decreases linearly towards
zero, as one moves through 360 degrees.

The following script draws the spiral and calculates the area for
angles between 0 and 360 (0 and 2*pi radian).

Will this do, or do you need to take the measured data into account?
In that case, your method is nearly correct.  You should, however,
approximate the area as that of a rectangular triangle:

1/2 * radius^2 * delta-angle

(radius * delta-angle is the length of one side of the trangle, radius
the length of the other)

This is the same method used to solve the line integral of the
theoretical function,

integral 1/2 (2 pi - theta)^2 R^2 dtheta

Regards
Stefan

----
R = 1;
theta = linspace(0, 2*pi, 1000);

area = R^2 * theta / 6 .* (theta.^2 - 6*pi*theta + 12*pi^2);

automatic_replot = 0;
subplot(121);
axis("square");
grid on;
polar(theta, (2*pi - theta)*R, ";Spiral;");

subplot(122);
plot(theta, area, ";Area under spiral;")
----

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 04:08:15PM -0700, Robert A. Macy wrote:
> I am not a mathematician, so not sure I can ask this
> correctly, but...
> I need to calculate a "spiral" integral - calculate the
> area a vector, or "ray", sweeps out as a spiral collapses.
>  
> 
> The tip of the vector monotonically decreases down to near
> zero value.  with 500 of these spirals.  
> 
> The data array is composed of 500 by 100 complex values.
>  The data along each row (500 rows) spirals down to near
> zero values at the highest index value.  
> 
> I would like to calculate the area the ray sweeps out as
> the spiral collapses.  
> 
> I tried a simple approach like using the area defined by
> radius times the change in angle (delta angle)
> 
> average( abs(arrayvalues) ) * delta( angle(arrayvalues) )
> 
> and then integrated these values along each row.  The mesh
> plots looked promising, BUT...
> 
> The angle function has a limited range so their plus minus
> transitions played havoc with the results.  The spirals can
> be over 700 to 1000 degrees.  
> 
> Plus, there is noise in the data, so the spiral tends to
> "lump" around 0,0 not necessarily converge to it, which
> again causes wild angle transitions.  However, along a row
> between any two adjacent array values the data seems to be
> monotonically decreasing (spiralling down) to zero values.
>  
> 
> Does anyone know of a simple algorithm that will take each
> vectors' end points, calculate the area, and sum that up
> over the 100 values along each row?  
> 
>              - Robert -
> 
> 
> 
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