topic Re: Pendulum acceleration in Mathcad

Pendulum acceleration

ValeryOchkov — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 07:32:42 GMT

Here, the students and I saw an animation on the site

showing the position of the velocity and acceleration vectors of the pendulum.
We wanted to reproduce the acceleration animation in Mathcad - see the animation and the file in the attachment.
But our animation is different from Wikipedia's animation - we have a maximum acceleration, and there is a minimum. Where is the error - with us or in Wikipedia?

Re: Pendulum acceleration

Fred_Kohlhepp — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 11:45:48 GMT

Words and images only! In Prime, gifs do not animate.

A pendulum is shown suspended at an angle from vertical. The red vector represents the force due to gravity--always vertical. The green vector represents the centripetal force from the pendulum arm--always radial.

The summation of those two accelerations (mass is the same) result in the tangential acceleration (blue vector)--always tangential.