Edited by Valentin Fadeev, Sunday, 18 Sept 2011, 23:23
This is quite a minor trick and like many things listed here may seem quite trivial. However, this is one of those few occasions when I had the tool in mind, before I actually got the example touse it on. Consider:
which does not really require a great effort to solve. But forget all the standard ways for a moment and add to both parts:
Hope this can be stretched to use in more complicated cases
Edited by Valentin Fadeev, Sunday, 18 Sept 2011, 23:24
This is problem 1.18 from JS (M821 course book). The question is to investigate the motion of a bead that slides on a smooth parabolic wire rotating with constant angular velocity about a vertical axis. is the distance from the axis of rotation.
To simplyfy the calculations we can choose the scale so that equation of the parabola is .
Yes, I know as a grown up man I should write out the expression of the kinetic energy:
where is the tangential velocity of the bead directed along the wire. Then define potential energy as usual:
bearing in mind that the force of gravity acts in the direction opposite to that of axis, hence changing the sign.
Construct the Lagrangian:
Define the action:
Use variational principle
to obtain the Euler-Lagrange equation:
Calculating separate terms:
Finally obtain the equation of motion:
However, I am tempted to use an alternative method that I learned on my secondary school physics lessons. It is based on the direct application of Newtons laws and projecting vector equation on coordinate axes. Writing out the second law we have to bear in mind that the bead is acted upon by gravitational force and the force of normal reaction which arises due to Newton's third law and acts along the normal to the wire.
Hence Newton's second law is expressed as follows:
Acceleration is split into the tangential and centripetal parts:
Projecting the equation on the vertcal axis we obtain:
where is the angle at which the tangent crosses the horizontal axis (hence )
Then project on the horizontal axis:
Eliminate :
Now calculate the tangential acceleration:
and the centripetal part:
Plug the above results into the equation:
to obtain the same result
Further analysis on the phase plane shows that when the wire rotates not very fast () the bead oscillates around the origin in the vertical plane. If the bead is moving along the wire away from the origin, it's velocity tending asymptotically to value
Edited by Valentin Fadeev, Sunday, 18 Sept 2011, 23:24
The first (unguided) steps in dynamical systems. The task is to prove that the phase paths of the following system:
are isochronous spirals, that is, every circuit of every path around the origin takes the same time. It looks a bit scary, because it involves not one but two "bad" functions. Thle easiest way to deal with these is to break the picture in quadrants and examine each part separately.
First quadrant: ,
Second quadrant: ,
Third quadrant: , , the same solution as for the first quadrant.
Fourth quadrant: , , the same solution as for the second quadrant.
Introduce polar coordinates.
I,III:
II,IV:
Let be a closed circuit enclosing the origin. The elapsed time is given by the following formula:
As the functions are periodic, it is sufficient to give proof for one loop. Due to the axial symmetry of the trajectory we can calculate transit time only in the first and the second quadrants and then double the result. If we integrate counter-clockwise, then we would follow the trajectory in a reversed direction. Therefore, we need to put the negative signe before the integrals.(oh, how long it took me to realize this..) In polar coordinates this expression has the following form:
Differentiating the expression for by we obtain:
A-ha, that's where we get the independence of the final result on the path choice: the arbitrary constant gets cancelled out.
Let , then ,
I made some false starts on getting a negative answer which is impossible for a strictly positive integrand. Still not quite sure where I went wrong. Normally these things happen when a singularity sneaks in inside the domain of integration after variable change. Anyway, I decided to cheat and shift the scale.
Edited by Valentin Fadeev, Sunday, 16 Jan 2011, 23:18
With the new courses yet to start, hopefully providing fresh material for new posts, I have been spending time going through some excercises from new textbooks.
As integrals have always been my favourite part of calculus, I decided to take down this solution, because it just looks nice. It also illustrates the principle: don't make a substitution, until it becomes obvious.
MathJax failure: TeX parse error: Extra close brace or missing open brace
Since we have and , so we need to choose negative sign when taking square root of the quadratic term.
It's now that the substitute becomes an obvious choice.
This blog might contain posts that are only
visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you
have an account on the system, please log in for full access.