WellenStudio Manual

WellenStudio is a program for the visualization of wave propagation in the plane. It supports punctiform exciters, finite and infinitely expanded line exciters, straight chains of exciters (e. g. for the demonstration of Huygens' principle) and their arrangement in regular polygons.

Select the kind of exciter to place from the toolbar. The number of exciters per chain and/or the number of corners for the polygon can be set under "global options".

You can place exciters by clicking the left mouse button once onto the plane, and dragging a line with the mouse button pressed where applicable. The program then performs pre-calculations for some seconds before it allows you to run the animations forward or backwards using the green arrows.

Using the other four buttons, you can switch the display between state (animated), amplitude, intensity and phase shift for each view separately.

In the toolbar you can select the kind of observer to place. The following options are offered: punctiform, segment, semicircular, rectangular in 2D view, rectangular in 3D view. For the point observer you just click onto the desired places, for the others you drag a line and a rectangle using the mouse respectively. When selecting one of the two rectangular possibilities you can select the whole window content with one single mouse click

If you choose the selection mode from the toolbar, you can select exciters and observers. Clicking with the right mouse button brings up the respective properties. There, you can change amplitude and phase shift.

The shifting tool enables you to shift window contents in the 2D view by dragging the mouse or specifying a new center. The magnifying glass tool serves for zooming in (left mouse button) and out (right mouse button). The point of clicking becomes the new center. Dragging a rectangle makes this the new clipping.

The arrangement of the exciters can be saved to a file, of course (except the views though) and loaded later again. Try out the provided examples. Some of them need considerable precalculation time. Please be patient.

Although WellenStudio looks like an MDI application you can in fact only work with one document at a time, but nevertheless using multiple views. (And nobody prevents you from starting several instances of the program.)

System Requirements

Although the animation is implemented highly optimized, it needs a certain arithmetic performance and quite a bit of memory.

Mininimal:
Pentium class processor
32 MB RAM
32/64 Bit Windows

Recommended:
Pentium II class processor
64 MB RAM
32/64 Bit Windows

Optimum:
GHz class Athlon XP, Pentium IV, or better
at least 128 MB RAM
32/64 Bit Windows

Pleas note: The program only works at 16 or 32 Bits color depth, but not at 24 bits.