Originally posted by griffonluv
Damn. I'm very confused by all of this...
what you did was put your angle in to the calculator in the angular form of miles per hour (i.e. degrees) when the calculator was set up to work with the angles that are easier to work with, but difficult to understand (i.e. radians)
On your calculator screen there will be a little r or a little d somewhere telling you what mode the calculator is operating in. If it's a d, then it's operating in degrees. If it's an r, it's operating in radians.
If you put the wrong type of information in, you'll get the wrong answer, the calculator has no idea if you're doing it wrong or not, it just gets the answer for the information it thinks it's being given.
(I've got no idea of what the newton calculator operates in. put 90 in and the sine should be 1 and the cosine should be 0 if it's in degrees)
Now for the forces, it's difficult to explain without a diagram, and really, you should have been taught this already at school.
(this is the best I could find)
Notice, Fgrav points in the same direction, but it can be split up into two components. 1 points parallel to the surface of the hill, and the other points directly down through the track (this is the normal force)
Now, if the angle changes, the gravity force points in the same direction all the time, however the two components change.
If the hill is horizontally flat, i.e. there's no banking. Then there is no force parallel to the track, and the normal force is equal to banking.
If the hill is pointing straight up, i.e. vertical, lift hill angle =90 degrees, then all the force is parallel to the track, and there is no normal force.If the hill was pointing at a 45 degrees angle, then both forces would be the same.
Now here's where it gets tricky, and the sines and cosines come in. Make sure you understand all of the above before you read the next bit.
what those three forces are actually making is a right angled triangle, with the force of gravity acting as a hypotenuse (i.e. the longest side)
Because it's a right angled triangle, we can use sine and cosine ratios to figure out the size of these parallel and perpendicular forces.
now for the normal force, the angle between it, and the hypotenuse (i.e. Fgrav) is the same as the lift hill angle. We'll call this the adjacent side of the triangle (for reasons that when you do some proper maths, you see)
The cos ratio is equal to the following:
Cos(angle)=adjacent / hypotenuse
now, because we know that the hypoteneuse is equal to 1 g, that simpfies things to this:
Cos(lift hill angle) = Normal forceNow, sin comes into it, because the longtudinal force completes the triangle if it moved so that the start point is at the end of the normal force. Now it is opposite the angle. And the sine ratio is as follows:
sin(angle)=opposite / hypotenuse
which simplifies to:
Sin(lift hill angle) = Longitudinal forceright, now here's a quick check:
what's the normal force of a lift hill at the following angles?
1) 35 degrees a) 0.574 b) 0.819 c) -0.428 d) -0.904
2) 67 degrees a) 0.921 b) 0.391 c) -0.856 d) -0.518
get a calculator and try it. If you get an answer other than b for both, you've done something wrong. And I've chosen the other answers for particular errors that you might make.
Originally posted by entropy
I think blythy made it sound much more complicated than it is.
Possibly, but he had made a double error. (using sin, and using radians)
Originally posted by Panther16
Theres alot of teachers on this website.
nope, engineering student. I do know what I'm talking about though, even though entropy is far smarter (how he can handle quarternions when I could barely get my head around euler the other week I don't know) although newton seems to be crap at letting me do an immelman.