In school physics classes students need to learn something about the properties of waves. To gain some experience of the way that waves behave there are various practical experiments and demonstrations that can be done. One of them is the ripple tank.
The Ripple Tank Simulation App
In real life these experiments can be difficult and messy. So what if we could simulate that tank of water in an app on a phone, tablet or PC? That is the purpose of the app called Wavicle.
A square transparent tank is filled with water. Ripples travelling across the surface of that water can then be created to investigate wave phenomena like reflection, refraction, diffraction and interference.
The surface of the water acts like an elastic sheet. Each little piece of that sheet is connected to neighbouring pieces. If the piece is pulled above those neighbours, that connection tends to pull it back down, while also pulling the neighbouring pieces up towards it. So any disturbance in that "sheet" - any pulling up or pushing down of any piece - propagates outwards as a wave. This behaviour is what is simulated in the app.
Open the app and touch the surface of the water to see what happens.
The water tank is the big blue square in the middle of the screen.
You should see ripples spreading out from wherever you touch, just as you would in a real tank of water.
Now try adding an object to the tank. There are "active" objects which actively causes disturbances on the water surface all by themselves, and "passive" objects which act as barriers, stopping the disturbances. These types of objects can be added by touching on the controls under the "Wave Makers Selector" heading at the bottom of the screen.
If you touch on the control at the right, it will expand as shown here to show you the kinds of barriers you can add to the tank.
Try adding a straight barrier. In a real ripple tank it would stand in the tank like this.
You can touch and drag the middle of the barrier to move it around the tank, or touch and drag the ends to change its length.
