Damping vibrating cantilever beam

please *always* reply to the mailing list. not only individual people. thanks.

I see you point on how meaningless it is to try to include effect of room
temperature through a thermostat, thanks for that. As you suggested, I will
definitely try to thermalize the system beforehand and then apply initial
velocity with no thermostat. I hope it won't get the system too heated-up
and blow up the simulation. In addition, I understand that gravitational
effects are minimal. Thanks for that explanation too. Finally, as I
explained in my reply to Carlos, I am trying to uncover plastic deformation
(if there is any) at the end of my simulation. That is why I am trying to
damp out beam vibration and elastic deformation. I could wait for the system

but the damping will just arbitrarily reduce deformation the amount of
the reduction will depend on the strength of your damping, which
renders it pretty much a worthless operation. as i said before: either
you keep it without manipulation and quantify how much (non-elastic)
deformation you get for a given time. that will give you an upper
limit. if you do this with different initial velocities, you have all
the information that you would want in a systematical and reproducible
manner and without any of it being tainted.

come into a rest, but it would take a very long time. I thought there must
be a peaceful way to slow it down (without loosing the physics I am trying
to capture).

a "very long time" in terms of the size and time scales of simulations
usually translates into "indistinguishable from infinity".

In response to your new message: But I need to see if and how the initial
velocity causes the beam to deform plastically at a macroscopic sense. Like,
I need to see if it bends for instance.

yes, i understood that, but - as carlos hinted at - you are thinking
in terms of scaling down a macroscopic experiment to nano scale and
are not taking into account how things are different in simulations
and that you can often do much better in simulations by *not*
mimicking a macroscopic experiment but building an atomic scale
experiment that reduces the number of variables to the essential ones.

axel.