public class FirstOrderConverter
extends Object
implements FirstOrderDifferentialEquations

This class converts second order differential equations to first order ones.

This class is a wrapper around a SecondOrderDifferentialEquations which allow to use a FirstOrderIntegrator to integrate it.

The transformation is done by changing the n dimension state vector to a 2n dimension vector, where the first n components are the initial state variables and the n last components are their first time derivative. The first time derivative of this state vector then really contains both the first and second time derivative of the initial state vector, which can be handled by the underlying second order equations set.

One should be aware that the data is duplicated during the transformation process and that for each call to computeDerivatives, this wrapper does copy 4n scalars : 2n before the call to computeSecondDerivatives in order to dispatch the y state vector into z and zDot, and 2n after the call to gather zDot and zDDot into yDot. Since the underlying problem by itself perhaps also needs to copy data and dispatch the arrays into domain objects, this has an impact on both memory and CPU usage. The only way to avoid this duplication is to perform the transformation at the problem level, i.e. to implement the problem as a first order one and then avoid using this class.