What will be the equation of motion of driven pendulum for amplitudes beyond the small angle approximation?

As was mentioned in the comments, the differential equation you give is not solvable analytically. What one can do is one can go beyond the small angle approximation in a controlled fashion by Taylor expanding the sine and cosine function and find (e.g. expanding up to order $x^3$)

$$I \ddot x + b\dot x + mgl\left( x - \frac{x^3}{6}\right) = F \cos(\omega t) \left( 1 - \frac{x^2}{2} \right) $$

This still is a non-linear differential equation and might not be solvable either, but it opens the door for Perturbation Theory, which is the major tool to use when going beyong linear approximations.


The solutions for a forced/driven pendulum can be chaotic, in the sense of chaos theory, so the period may not even exist! For a tutorial on see these course notes for example. What you can do with an forced/driven pendulum is to simulate it and compute the various chaos-theory related parameters: Lyapunov exponents, Poincare map, etc. There are numerous resources on the web for that. Here are a few such resources:

  • A Mathematica CDF, which has some [foot]notes on the implementaion.
  • There also various (more or less annoying) applets on the web with a similar simulation. Essentially they are all based on Runge-Kuta numerical solutions. You can find more concise/intelligible Java source code in Tao Pang An Introduction to Computational Physics, pp. 92-93
  • A short paper on a Python scipy implementation.
  • A question here about Lyapunov exponents for the driven pendulum equation.

Etc. If all you want is to compute the period for non-small angles for an unforced pendulum, Wikipedia has some answers, most notably the fairly fast (in practice) Carvalhaes and Suppes approximation.

Addendum for the more mathematically inclined: the perturbation method doesn't always work for the forced pendulum equation. In particular it doesn't work for Hubbard’s pendulum equation, which is an instance of the general forced pendulum equation. There's a relatively recent (2008) computer-assited proof of chaotic behavior in that case.