Taming chaos with disorder in a pendulum array

We designed and constructed an array of ten forced damped nonlinear pendulu ms. We drove the pivot of the pendulums in a vertical circle and torsionall y coupled them with springs. We analyzed the motion using digitized videota pe. The behavior of die real array closely mirrored the behavior of its com puter simulation. For a homogeneous array of identical pendulums, the spati otemporal dynamics was chaotic; for a heterogeneous array of nonidentical p endulums, the spatiotemporal dynamics was periodic. Such temporally fixed b ut spatially varying chaos control has been called "disorder taming chaos." (C) 1999 American Association of Physics Teachers.