How can I integrate a constant

I have an equation that produces a value for constant acceleration, and produces a straight line graph. I need to find the corresponding values for velocity and displacement and plot their graphs as well over a period of time. I tried using cumtrapz(a), but my values for vel and disp turn out to be zero. How can I integrate the acceleration w.r.t time?

[Roger Stafford]

For a constant acceleration, the velocity will be the initial velocity plus the constant acceleration multiplied by the time. The displacement will be the initial displacement plus the initial velocity multiplied by the time plus half the acceleration multiplied by the square of the time. Why bother with having matlab do the integration when such a simple method is available?

The time to use matlab would be with an acceleration that varies with time and/or with distance.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

See if something like this does what you want:

t = 0:4;                                        % Time Vector
Accel = 1.5 * ones(1, 5);                       % Acceleration Vector
Vel = cumtrapz(t, Accel);                       % Velocity Vector
Disp = cumtrapz(t, Vel);                        % Displacement Vector

figure(1)
plot(t, Accel)
hold on
plot(t, Vel)
plot(t, Disp)
hold off
grid
legend('Acceleration', 'Velocity', 'Displacement', 'Location','NW')