PHYS 1P21 Lecture 46: Elastic potential energy and Damped oscillations

• School: Brock University
• Department: Physics
• Course: PHYS 1P21
• Professor: Santo D' Agostino

Document Summary

Simple harmonic motion - elastic potential energy and damped oscillations. Answering this question leads to the concept of a force field; we"ll discuss force fields in phys. Exercises: consider a block of mass 5. 1 kg attached to a spring. Recall from earlier in these lecture notes that for a block on the end of a spring, applying. This is an example of a differential equation, and to solve a differential equation means to determine a position function x(t) that satisfies the equation. From a different perspective, we can also infer that if a physical phenomenon is modelled by a differential equation of the form given above, the phenomenon is an example of simple harmonic motion. In the radial direction, applying newton"s second law gives: In the tangential direction, applying newton"s second law gives: This looks very similar to the differential equation written earlier that represents simple harmonic motion.