I hold a trebuchet competition for young junior engineers in my company. It starts from building a small wooden trebuchet, then predicting a shooting range, then testing and verification. The small wooden models we build are nice, but they show low efficiency (about 10% only) in converting potential energy to kinematic. So we struggle to improve the toy efficiency a little bit higher. Wolfram Community discussion Modeling a Trebuchet lead by @Erik Mahieu and based on his demonstration Trebuchet Ballistics and Optimizing the Counterweight Trebuchet was very helpful in understanding the physical model and trebuchet dynamics.
Our small competition has just finished this week. It was a very exciting game. Totally, 11 teams participated in this competition and they made 11 wooden models. Nobody was able to make any further development for Mathematica model and code beyond @Erik Mahieu's demonstration. Although it is simple device, only 140 g of weight and 200mm of main beam length, we improved the actually efficiency from 10% to 60%, and shooting range from 1 meter to 6 meters.
I attached a few images and introduce PDF NB files for your information. Thank you very much @Erik Mahieu for model, kind guidance and sharing your works on Wolfram Demonstrations and Wolfram Community.
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