For a single analysis, the computed quantities are displacement, velocity, acceleration, total acceleration, spring force, damping force, total inertia force. The user can pick time or any of the computed quantities for any of the plot axes. That gives a flexibility of plotting any two quantities in terms of each other.

When the analysis is bidirectional, two plot series are generated, one for each direction. An exception to that is if the analysis is bidirectional and the user picks two similar quantities, like displacement vs. displacement. BiSpec will generate a 2D interaction plot in this case (1 series only), plotting the displacement in direction 1 vs. the displacement in direction 2, which is the path of the pendulum system in xy plane. The quantities to be plot on different axes can be conveniently picked by pushing buttons below and next to the X and Y axes of the plot. The dialog has some "shortcut" buttons to help the user quickly generate preferred plots. Those buttons could generate:

The dialog also contains text boxes showing the maximum values of the plot data. Four values are provided, those are maximum X and maximum Y (in absolute terms), for both directions. Two other text boxes provide the instantaneous coordinates pointed to by the mouse cursor. Those values change continuously as the mouse is moved over the plot.

Figure 1: Hysteresis Plot