Analysis: Adding forces Part 1

Now that you have internalised the concept of the Free Body Diagram, you can reveal forces.

What can you do with them?

We’ll find many ways to manipulate forces in the next few weeks. Here we’ll start by ‘adding’ them. By ‘add’ we mean finding out how we can combine forces and replace their combined effect by a single force.

There is important terminology here; two or more ‘components’ can be combined to give a single ‘resultant’. And it works the other way round too; a single ‘resultant’ can be decomposed into (usually two) components.

Forces are ‘vectors’ which means that there are particular rules for manipulating them. This video gives you the general procedures. The next video applies these procedures to the configuration of our experiment.

Talking points

• How did you get on with the trigonometry?