Atwood's Machine Without Hanging Masses

Abstract

Atwood's machine is presented in introductory physics courses as an exercise in the simultaneous solution of Newton's second law for translational and rotational motions, assuming the pulley has nonnegligible mass. Occasionally it is also used as a lecture demonstration or for quantitative laboratory measurements of a system undergoing constant acceleration. As discussed in this paper, one can progressively simplify the apparatus while maintaining these pedagogical goals, to end up with an easy way to measure the value of the freefall acceleration, g, by counting to ten.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA573632

Entities

People

  • Carl E. Mungan

Organizations

  • United States Naval Academy

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Angular Acceleration
  • Buildings And Structures
  • Demonstrations
  • Energy
  • Energy Conservation
  • Equations
  • Inertia
  • Information Operations
  • Kinetic Energy
  • Mass
  • Measurement
  • Moment Of Inertia
  • Motion
  • Potential Energy
  • Simultaneous Equations
  • Students
  • United States Naval Academy

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Control Systems Engineering.
  • STEM Education