Discover the expert in you.
Discover the expert in you.
Force and energy are key components, along with design, in getting a catapult to launch an object into the air. Catapults have been built since at least A.D. 300 beginning with a basic design, and becoming more complex as technology evolved. However, designs are based on the ideas of force and energy.
In the context of gas furnaces, a reducer is an object that reduces a flow of liquid or gas. Reducers are extremely useful where you need to join two pipes of different diameters together, since they cater quite happily for two discrete dimensional characteristics. Further, they allow you to have some control over the pressure at which you release gas or water.
A cantilever is a type of beam that has no support on its open end, a seesaw for example. This means that two different forces are acting on the beam when a load is applied. They are known as the shear force and bending moment. You can calculate these forces using two mathematical equations. To do this you will need to determine the different variables of the cantilever needed for the calculations.
The stress of a cantilevered beam is measured in pounds per square inch or psi. The stress of this type of beam can be calculated using a mathematical equation. However, to solve this equation you require variables that are obtained from measuring the cantilevered beam. Once known, you can then apply the variables to the equation to calculate the stress on the cantilevered beam.
When considering velocity in the context of physics, the concept can seem complicated, but can be understood in several ways. In physics, velocity is defined as a vector quantity made up of a body's speed, as well as the direction that the body is traveling. Velocity is the measurement of both speed and direction, which is done by examining certain elements. The equation for velocity is V = S/T.
Learn to determine the minimum force required to pull an object across a flat surface using a little mathematics and basic physics. Newton's second law states that a net force is needed to cause an object to accelerate. When pulling an object on a flat surface, the net force equals the pulling force minus the force of static friction opposing the motion of the object. The result then is that to be able to move the object, accelerating it from rest, the pulling force must exceed the force of static friction.
Everything on Earth is falling. Put another way, everything is being pulled toward the center of the Earth by the force of gravity. Of course, most objects, most of the time, are being held up by something --- a water glass by the kitchen counter, a snowdrift by the friction of the snow beneath, a mountaintop by the layers of rock under it. But if this support is removed, the object falls --- the glass shatters on the floor, snow slides down the bank, boulders crash to the valley. In all of these situations, the acceleration due to gravity is…
Tension is the amount of force a string exerts on an object as it is pulled from one or both ends. The force of tension is measured parallel to the string that is being pulled. The system consisting of the object(s) and string has either no acceleration and is in equilibrium with a net force of zero or has an acceleration indicating the system is undergoing a net force greater than zero. In the case of a tassel being held by a string, the system is in equilibrium since the tassel is not accelerating.
The creation of a bridge is an engineering problem that must consider various factors unique to the location and purpose of that bridge. Structural stability must be paramount for a bridge to be functional, and there are many different configurations appropriate for different conditions and obstacles. A bridge is any structure designed and constructed to span some otherwise impassable or inconvenient terrain.
Friction robs devices of their performance capacity, whether it's a sled headed down a snowy hill, car tires rolling down the freeway, or water shooting out of a fire hose. While each device has its own formula for estimating specific loss of capacity due to friction, in most instances the loss is a constant factor multiplied by the maximum capacity. The example below relates to estimating friction loss when using fire hoses of different sizes.
Sir Issac Newton was the first to develop the classical laws of motion, and these laws are applied to a diverse range of phenomena -- from motion of the planets to the design of vehicles. Tension is force in response to the stretching of an object, such as a piece of string. String tension can be calculated using a simple experiment by hanging a weight from it.
Magnetic materials are essential to such devices as loudspeakers, transformers and computer hard drives. Magnets possess a north and a south pole, and when two are placed next to each other, they experience a mutual force. When the similar poles of two magnets are brought into close proximity, they experience a mutual repulsion; when areas of opposite polarity are brought close together, they experience a mutual attraction. Measure the force generated by a magnet using a spring and other simple pieces of equipment.
Physics students everywhere, using the right-hand rule to remind themselves of the direction of a magnetic field around a current-carrying wire, can thank French mathematician Andre-Marie Ampere for the rule and scientists' first understanding of the physics behind it. Called by Ampere the "swimmer's rule," it said that a man swimming in the direction of current flow in a wire, and facing a compass needle, would see the compass needle deflected toward his left hand. A magnetic field resulting from the current in the wire causes this deflection. You'll have no trouble calculating the strength of such a magnetic field.
A force is defined as an influence that may lead to a body's change in acceleration. It was Newton's laws of motion that first identified the characteristics of forces, and the laws are still used in a diverse range of applications, from determining the outcome of impacts to determining the motion of planets. Fundamentally, there are four forces of nature and these are gravity, electromagnetic, weak and strong. Other types of forces exist, and one such example is tension, which is the response to stretching.
Friction can be considered a nuisance since it resists motion and slows sliding objects to an eventual stop, but without friction, you would not be able to walk, bicycles would not be able to move and you would slide right off your chair when you sit down. The force due to friction is dependent on a value called the coefficient of friction, which varies between different materials. As an object slides, it will experience a force in opposition to its movement proportional to the weight of the object.
It's a central tenet of Newtonian mechanics that force is the product of mass and acceleration. For this reason, a commonly used unit of force, the Newton (N), represents kilogram meters per second squared, the kilogram being a unit used for mass, and meters per second squared being a unit used for acceleration. Because mass and acceleration bear the same relationship to force, either can be derived by finding the quotient of the other and a given force. For example, mass equals the quotient of force and acceleration; acceleration equals the quotient of force and mass. You'll have no trouble…
A vector is a geometric object that has both length and direction. Vectors play a fundamental role in science since they represent many physical quantities; for example, a velocity of an object, such as a car is a vector. Each vector has coordinates or components, such as "X" and "Y." A magnitude defines the length of the vector. The calculation of the magnitude is based on the Pythagorean Theorem and requires the vector coordinates.
The concept of a force is one of the most fundamental ideas in the physical sciences. A force is an influence that acts on a body to create motion of that body. A simple example of this is pushing a box, which then moves across a floor. A force can be applied in different directions, with varying magnitudes. In such situations, it can be difficult to know what direction the total of all forces is acting in. However, this can be determined in a few short steps.
In engineering applications, it is important to understand the amount of weight (or load) that a structure can support. It is especially important to understand the forces that are applied to a structure in different directions. The shear strength is the load that an object is able to withstand in a direction parallel to the face of the material, as opposed to perpendicular to the surface. The shear strength of an object can be calculated in a series of short steps.
Learn to calculate the magnitude of average acceleration to find the rate of change of an object's velocity. Acceleration has units of length per square second. Like all vector quantities, average acceleration has a magnitude and direction found by manipulating its "x" and "y" components. For example, an average acceleration might be written as 20 feet per square second in the "x" direction and 10 feet per square second in the "y" direction. Finding the magnitude of the average acceleration tells you the size of the acceleration.
Conversion factors transform measurements from one unit to another. Science instructors generally teach students to perform unit conversions by the method of dimensional analysis, which involves the cancellation of units in ratios such that if the final units are correct, the student probably performed the conversion successfully. Performing unit conversions without using an online conversion tool requires access to a table of conversion factors.
When molecules initially form bonds, the shape of the molecule is determined by the chemical composition of the molecule. The geometry of the molecule can change drastically, depending on the elements that compose that particular molecular structure. Ovality is a concept in chemistry which refers to the general shape of a molecule. Defined as the ratio between the volume and the area of the molecule, the ovality describes whether the molecule is more spherical in shape, or more elongated, like a cigar.
Physicists calculate the velocity of an object as its change in position divided by the time elapsed during that change. In the case of the Earth (a sphere spinning on an axis), the distance traveled in one day represents the circumference of the earth and the elapsed time is about 24 hours. However, the circumference changes depending on the point on the earth's surface used as a reference. For example, a point on the Earth's equator travels much faster than a point near one of the poles.
Velocity is a vector, which means it has both magnitude or length and direction. In math and physics, however, we often need to break the velocity vector down into its components -- how fast an object is traveling with respect to the x-axis and how fast with respect to the y. Thanks to trigonometry, this kind of problem is not as difficult as you might think. If you have the angle between the velocity and another vector, you can use this in your calculations.
A bar magnet is a bar-shaped object that produces a magnetic field. Bar magnets are objects that are magnetized for very long periods of time. Objects that contain material that can be magnetized like this are referred to as ferromagnetic materials. Calculating the magnetic field of a bar magnet is not a straightforward task, as the field strength depends on the composition of the magnet; however, useful approximations can be made to determine the magnetic field from a bar magnet.
Two objects of different mass dropped from a building -- as purportedly done by Galileo at the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- will strike the ground simultaneously. This occurs because the acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 meters per second per second, 9.81 m/s^2, or 32 feet per second per second, 32 ft/s^2, regardless of mass. As a consequence, a falling object exhibits a velocity of 9.81 m/s or 32 ft/s for every second it experiences free fall. Or, mathematically, velocity (v), is calculated via v = gt, where g represents the acceleration due to gravity and t represents time…
The buoyant force is what keeps boats and other floating objects from sinking. An object placed in water causes the water level to rise an amount equal to the volume of the object below the surface. Archimedes' principle states that the weight of the water moved by the presence of the object equals the buoyant force upward on the object. Once the volume of the submerged object is determined, the weight of the displaced water can be found using the weight density of water.
According to Ampere's Circuital Law and Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism, a moving electric charge, or current, will create a magnetic field. A current flowing through a sheet -- a two-dimensional plane, for example a sheet of paper -- will create a magnetic field that depends on the geometry of the sheet. While a sheet is two-dimensional and therefore there is no "inside" to a sheet, the magnetic field from the sheet can be readily calculated using the laws of electromagnetism.
Angle Iron, or L bar-shaped iron, is commonly used in types of construction work. Because the shape of angle iron is very basic and geometric, it's possible to calculate the weight of angle iron knowing only its dimensions and the density of cast iron.
A vector is a line with both length and direction. The length of a vector is called its magnitude. In physics, velocity is often treated as a vector, because it has both direction and magnitude, although the magnitude of a velocity vector is usually just called speed. If your car is traveling at 50 mph, for example, this number is the speed, but if it's traveling at 50 mph bound 10 degrees south of west, you have its velocity vector. Problems involving speed and velocity are common in intro physics classes.
Galileo first posited that objects fall toward earth at a rate independent of their mass. That is, all objects accelerate at the same rate during free-fall. Physicists later established that the objects accelerate at 9.81 meters per square second, m/s^2, or 32 feet per square second, ft/s^2; physicists now refer to these constants as the acceleration due to gravity, g. Physicists also established equations for describing the relationship between the velocity or speed of an object, v, the distance it travels, d, and time, t, it spends in free-fall. Specifically, v = g * t, and d = 0.5 *…
Angle iron is a piece of iron that is bent at a 90-degree angle. The resulting rod finds uses as a structural element in many different applications. One especially important element of angle iron (or any structural element) is it's bending strength, which is defined as a body's ability to resist deformation when a load is applied to the body. Strong structural elements can resist high loads, and are therefore desirable to use in construction. Calculating the bending strength of an angle iron can be accomplished in a few short steps.
A catapult is a mechanical device that is used to launch projectiles great distances. Catapults were often used as weapons in medieval times; now, they are more commonly constructed by hobbyists. An understanding of how catapults operate requires rudimentary knowledge of concepts in physics, such as elastic potential energy. By increasing this elastic potential energy, a greater elastic force can be imparted by the catapult -- thus hurling the projectile farther.
A spring constant is a physical attribute of a spring. Each spring has its own spring constant. The spring constant describes the relationship between the force applied to the spring and the extension of the spring from its equilibrium state. This relationship is described by Hooke's Law, F = -kx, where F represents the force on the springs, x represents the extension of the spring from its equilibrium length and k represents the spring constant.
Motors run at a specific revolutions per minute (RPM) and a speed reducer is needed if you want to keep that motor, but have a lower RPM. Calculating the RPM resulting from a motor and speed reducer assembly requires only basic mathematical knowledge.
A solenoid is a coil of wire. When electric current passes through a solenoid, it generates a magnetic field. The strength of the magnetic field depends on how closely spaced the turns in the coil are, the amount of current passing through it, and the magnetic properties of the core material that the coil is wrapped around. Solenoids are used for a variety of purposes, including certain kinds of motors and automatic switching systems. Often solenoids are used in circuits as a kind of component called an inductor.
A distributed load is a force spread over a surface or line. The distributed load on a surface can be expressed in terms of force per unit area, such as kilonewtons (kN) per square meter. The load on a beam can be expressed as force per unit length, such as kN per meter. A point load is an equivalent load applied to a single point. You can determine it by computing the total load over the object's surface or length and attributing the entire load to its center.
A hydraulic press is a mechanical lever that allows heavy objects to be lifted with minimal effort. This is because a hydraulic press relies on Pascal's principle to move the objects: That is, the pressure in an enclosed system remains constant. Two (or more) pistons act as the levers to raise the object, and applying a small force on one of the pistons can lead to large forces on the other piston. Calculating the pressure is therefore important for using a hydraulic press, and this value is calculated in pounds per square inch (psi).
Shear stress is defined as the internal forces acting on an object when a force acts parallel to the face of the material, whereas shear strength is the maximum force the object can handle before becoming structurally compromised. Calculating the shear strength of a bolt can be particularly important, especially during construction work, as very large stresses can cause the bolts to fail.
The index used to physically quantify the planetary energy imbalance that is responsible for climate change is known as "radiative forcing." By definition, its overall value is the net change in irradiance at the boundary of the troposphere and the stratosphere (the beginning of Earth's atmosphere). A balanced exchange of energy between the Earth and the sun, measured against a standard value, would see a measurement of zero on this index. Unfortunately this is not the case, and several formulas exist for calculating the radiative forcing due to the concentration of various greenhouse gases, all derived from empirically-designed models.
When force is applied to an object at a certain point, it does two things: push the object, and rotate the object. The amount of that rotational tendency is described by the moment of force. A moment of force is a vector: it has both a magnitude (the strength of the rotational force) and a direction (the axis along which the rotation will take place). The direction can be determined using the right hand rule: with your thumb pointed along the moment of force, your fingers curl in the direction of rotation. Calculating the moment of force is simple vector…
Rotational force, also known as torque or centripetal force, is the measurement of the force of an object rotating around a central axis or pivot. For example, using a wrench to turn a bolt creates enough force to either tighten or remove the bolt. The force that is coming from turning the wrench is considered the rotational force that is being created. To find rotational force, a person must know the mass of the object creating the torque, the velocity that it is being moved, and the radius of how far away the object is from the axis.
Calculating bolt torque, the force required to turn a bolt such that it delivers a known amount of tension, can be found using a simple equation. This equation assumes the most rudimentary of cases; it does not account for any lubrication used on the bolt or nut, any locking mechanisms used or nonstandard threads used. It is critical to apply the correct amount of torque to a bolt; under-torquing can lead to uneven loads delivered to the rest of the assembly, while over-torquing can result in failure at the secured area.
Cantilevers are beams that jut out of a structure without a support on the free end, much like a diving board. Cantilevers often carry loads when they are used in buildings--such as for balconies--or bridges or towers. Even the wings of an airplane can be thought of as cantilevered beams. When a load sits on a cantilevered beam, two reactions occur at its support. There is the vertical shear force, which counteracts the object's weight, but the greater force is often the bending moment, which keeps the beam from rotating. You can calculate these loads using a couple equations.
A shear force deforms a rectangular shaft into the shape of a parallelogram. This is caused by a force being applied across the top surface of the rectangle while another force pushes the bottom surface the opposite direction. The volume of the shaft remains the same. The shear force is related to the top surface area of the shaft, the horizontal distance the sheared face moves, the height of the shaft and a constant called the shear modulus. Every material has its own unique shear modulus, or modulus of rigidity as it is named in engineering.
The repulsive force generated by a magnet can be calculated by using household materials. Consider two identical bar magnets. Each has a northern and a southern pole. The northern and southern poles of the magnets mutually repel one another when brought together. In physics, force has the same unit as weight; therefore you can use a scale and two identical bar magnets to determine the "pushing" force of one magnet on the other. The earth has a magnetic north and south pole just as if a giant bar magnetic was implanted inside of it.
A body exposed to moving air or wind experiences an aerodynamic lift force. This force acts in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the wind flow. The amount of lift generated by the wind can be determined by multiplying four physical characteristics of the wind and the surface undergoing the lift. The air density, wind speed, area of the surface, and lift coefficient combine to determine the lift force. These characteristics can also be adjusted if an application requires a certain amount of lift force.
Impulse is a measurement of how much force is applied over a period of time. In mathematical terms, impulse is the integral of force with respect to time. If the force applied is constant (that is, if it does not change over time), then the measurement can be simplified to being the force times the amount of time. Impulse is an important measurement that is used, most importantly in astronautics and rocketry, to describe and compare engines with one another.
Electric motors perform work by converting electrical energy into that of mechanical. The mechanical energy is usually manifested by a rotatable shaft or armature. In vehicles, this armature operates propellers and wheels. RPM, or revolutions per minute, indicates how many turns the object can make, or how fast it can rotate. The force the motor applies to make the objects spin is called a torque. Engineers wish to know how quickly or how powerfully the motor can use torque to do work, and they use horsepower to measure this. To calculate the RPM of a motor, use torque and horsepower.
Work efficiency uses a ratio to determine how efficiently a machine operates. The less waste in the operation, the better the efficiency. A perfect work efficiency of 1 means that every unit of work put into the machine produces an equal outcome. Solve the work efficiency as either a decimal or a percentage to see how well a machine works.
Measure the force of a falling object by the impact the object makes when it stops falling. Assuming the object falls at the rate of Earth's regular gravitational pull, you can determine the force of the impact by knowing the mass of the object and the height from which it is dropped. Also, you need to know how far the object penetrates the ground because the deeper it travels the less force of impact the object has.
Friction is a force between two objects in contact. This force acts on objects in motion to help bring them to a stop. The friction force is calculated using the normal force, a force acting on objects resting on surfaces and a value known as the friction coefficient.
Calculating the strength of a force can seem daunting at first to anybody who remembers physics class problems that could fill a chalkboard. However, given the simple equation F=ma—where "F" is the force, "m" is the mass of the object applying force, and "a" is the acceleration of the object applying force—it may take you only a few seconds to unravel the mechanical mysteries around you.
A force acts about a catapult's point of rotation in order to hurl an object through the air, often as a weapon. The driving force of the catapult is best measured as a "moment," or the amount of rotational force imparted to the catapult's arm. The resultant force on the projectile is a function of the rotational and tangential accelerations that the arm induces on it. Note that both the moment and resulting force on the projectile will vary throughout the catapult's motion.
Sir Isaac Newton defined force as an object's mass times its acceleration. This relationship among these three properties is very useful if you need to calculate the amount of force exerted on an object. An easy way to visualize the relationship among force, mass and acceleration is to consider a car that accelerates from a dead stop to a given speed. The car's engine must exert force to achieve that acceleration. The amount of force it needs to exert depends on the mass of the car.
Solenoids are spring-shaped coils of wire commonly used in electromagnets. If you run an electric current through a solenoid, a magnetic field will be generated. The magnetic field can exert a force on charged particles that is proportional to its strength. To calculate the force from a solenoid's magnetic field, you can use this equation: Force = charge x velocity of the charge x magnetic field strength As you can see from the equation, to calculate force we first need to know the magnetic field strength, which is dependent on the characteristics of the solenoid. We can substitute these parameters…
Thermal loss occurs in any operation that requires the use of energy to do work. Engines and motors are among the most common mechanisms used to transform stored energy, like that in gasoline, to the energy of motion called mechanical energy. All engines lose energy in the form of heat--thermal loss--and this lost energy cannot be used to do work. Heat is lost from engines through friction and the deformation of its parts. Calculating thermal loss can be done by subtracting the work accomplished by a mechanism from the amount of store energy put into it.
According to Newton's Second Law of Motion, the force, in Newtons, that an object exerts on another object is equal to the mass of the object times its acceleration. How can this be applied to calculating the forces involved in a crash? Keep in mind that acceleration is an object's change in speed over time. Objects involved in crashes usually decelerate--the numerically negative form of acceleration--to a stop. Calculating the amount of force involved in a crash is as simple as multiplying the mass of the crashing object by its deceleration.
When designing engines and motors, engineers aim for high efficiencies. The transformation of energy from potential to mechanical within engines causes a large percentage of it to be lost as heat due to friction and physical deformation. The easiest way to calculate the efficiency of an engine is to divide its work output by the energy input. This is easy to do once some basic measurements of the motor's performance are taken.
The force on a projectile after its initial acceleration includes gravitational force and air resistance. The gravitational force points vertically downward. The air resistance points opposite to the direction of motion. In the case of free fall, a projectile can reach a maximum velocity, or "terminal velocity," past which it won't accelerate because the gravitational and air resistance forces balance out. In such a case, the net force on the projectile is zero.
While performing basic engineering projects, you may sometimes need to calculate the gear ratio of two or more cogs. You may need to know gear ratio so you can know how much power, torque or speed can be gained from a given assemblage of cogs, or to make comparisons between prospective cog setups for your project. Knowing how to calculate gear ratio on an engineering level also allows you to make the same calculations for the gears on a bicycle or similar.
As discussed in Halliday and Resnick's "Fundamentals of Physcis," Hooke's law states that the formula relating the force a spring exerts, as a function of its displacement from its equilibrium length, is force F = -kx. x here is a measure of the displacement of the free end of the spring from its unloaded, unstressed position. k is a proportionality constant called the "stiffness," and is specific to each spring. The minus sign is in front because the force that the spring exerts is a "returning" force, meaning that it opposes the direction of displacement x, in an effort to…
Calculating the resultant force on a body by a combination of forces is a matter of adding the different acting forces componentwise, as discussed in Halliday and Resnick’s “Fundamentals of Physics.” Equivalently, you perform vector addition. Graphically, this means maintaining the angle of the vectors as you move them into position as a chain, one touching its head to the tail of another. Once the chain is completed, draw an arrow from the only tail without a head touching it to the only head without a tail touching it. This arrow is your resultant vector, equal in magnitude and direction…
Press fit force is the force necessary to put together cylindrical parts during manufacturing. Machinery must be programmed with the proper press fit force in order to ensure that the objects are properly shaped and formed, otherwise they will be unusable. Press fit force calculation is important in the manufacturing of cans, machine parts and numerous other cylindrical things. Calculating press fit force requires a pressure factor chart, which is available both online or at a local engineering facility, and some measurements and brief calculations that should cause no difficulty with the help of a calculator.
Electrical engineers create electromagnets by passing electrical currents through metal objects of certain shapes. They commonly use solenoidal pieces of wire as the basis for their magnets. They make solenoids by twisting lengths of metal in a spiral fashion around a cylindrical template; the common spring is a solenoid. Passing an electrical current through the solenoid results in a magnetic field that exerts force on nearby ferromagnetic objects, such as pieces of iron or steel. You can determine the magnitude of that force by plugging the dimensions and other properties of the magnet into a relatively simple equation.
If a body hangs off the center of a wire whose ends attach a negligible distance from each other, then the tension in the wire is half the weight of the body. It is as if each side of the wire holds up one half of the weight--as if they attached to the body at two places, sharing the weight between them. However, if the ends were pulled apart, but kept level, the wire’s tension would increase. Each side of the wire would no longer be fighting just the gravitational force pulling down on the hanging body, but also the…
Found in everything from garage door openers to webcam mounts, helical torsion springs are an extremely versatile resource in the fields of industrial design and mechanical engineering. Consisting of several loops of metal wire that are annealed into tight, permanent coils, each torsion spring produces a specific amount of resistant force in response to its shape, materials and how far you deform its body.
The main calculation of force vectors in introductory physics courses involves the decomposition of a force vector into perpendicular components. Vector addition entails placing vectors in a series, matching the head of one vector to the tail of the next, to form a chain. Such a chain is equivalent to a single vector drawn from the vector tail at one end of the chain to the vector head at the opposite end of the series. Therefore, vector decomposition into perpendicular vectors is grounded in--and equivalent to--vector addition.
Railroad cars are used to move a wide range of materials across the United States. Hopper cars carry coal from the mines in Wyoming to coal-fired plants on the East Coast. Automobile transport cars move new vehicles from assembly plants to distribution centers across the country. Passenger cars carry commuters and long-distance travelers between cities and across states. Railroad cars can carry a significant amount of weight, but railroads have to determine how many and what types of engines to use, based on the weight of the cargo being hauled. Calculating the force needed to move a railroad car from…
Strength of materials tables have a variety of different stress values. Ultimate stress, whether it is tension, compression, shearing or bending, is the highest amount of stress a material can withstand. Yield stress is the stress value where plastic deformation occurs. Although important in engineering calculations, an accurate value for yield stress can be difficult to pinpoint.
Engineers often measure or calculate pressure in metric units. The unit for pressure is the Pascal, or one newton of force per square meter of area. Converting pressure to kiloPascals (kPa), which equals 1,000 Pascals, will abbreviate large pressure values. You must only consider the amount of force acting perpendicular to the surface. The kPa is also the unit of normal, or axial, stress and shear, or tangential stress. Calculating stress or pressure is a matter of determining the correct force vector and the correct cross-sectional area.
Shearing involves the application of force across a material, causing structural failure a certain point. The effects of shear failure make it look as if the material had been cut with a pair of scissors; this type of failure can be catastrophic, even if it occurs in something as simple as as a wooden bridge over a stream running across your property, which we will use as an example. This means that calculating the shear force affecting the unsupported beams that support those decorative bridges can be crucial.
Understanding strain in materials is simple: when you apply force to an object, the object deforms. In its most basic form, called normal strain, strain is the ratio of the change in the length of an object to the original length of the object. Strain lacks the element of dimension: you don't "strain" something down x number of inches," rather you apply force that results in a deformation represented by a quantitative ratio that measures a material's resistance to change.
Buoyancy, or buoyant force, is based on Archimedes' Principle. This principle states, "Any object, wholly or partly immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object." Archimides' Principle is important in hydro-engineering applications, such as shipbuilding. The steps below detail how to calculate buoyant force.
Pneumatic cylinders are commonly used to convert the energy provided by a compressed air source into usable kinetic energy. The cylinder rod extends and retracts to create a desired motion. The rod will extend and retract with a certain force, which is based on the diameter of the cylinder, and the pressure of the compressed air. This guide will teach you how to choose a cylinder of the correct size, based on your application.
Pneumatic cylinders or actuators are used for mechanical movements. These movements are employed every day in assembly lines and automated machinery. One advantage air cylinders have over hydraulic cylinders is the use of flow restrictors and pressure regulators, which can help with precision air adjustments.
Pneumatic cylinders are used widespread in industry for repetitive motion in the manipulation of objects. Whether that object is being pushed or pulled, that cylinder must have enough force in order to efficiently move the object. All air pressure is measured in pounds per square inch (PSI), and by following a basic process you can calculate the total force that a pneumatic cylinder can deliver.
Knowing Newton's three laws of motion is essential for completing basic physics calculations. It is Newton's second law that deals directly with force. Basically, Newton concluded that force is found by multiplying the mass of an object by the acceleration of that object. Once you understand this, calculating force is nothing more than a simple multiplication problem.
