Potential Energy TAMUK Department of Physics and 势能 TAMUK 物理系.docVIP

Potential Energy Conservative and Dissipative Forces Before moving on to the second type of energy, let us look at conservative and dissipative forces. Recall that we defined the work to be What would happen if we then traversed a second path, only this time going from x2 to x1? In some of the cases, we would find that the total work done would become zero. This is the hallmark of a conservative force. Specifically, we say that a force is conservative if It is independent of the path of the body and depends only on the starting point and ending point, It is completely reversible, and When the starting and ending points are the same, the total work is zero. If the force is not conservative, it is called a dissipative force. Example: The force of gravity is a conservative force. Let a box of mass m be moved around the path shown below and acted on only by gravity. Can break the work up into 4 pieces W12, W23, W34, W41. Then Definition of Potential Energy Whenever a force is conserved, we can define a potential energy for that force as follows: (12.1) This is interpreted physically as the potential energy due to the force at position x2 relative to x1. Example: What is the gravitational potential energy of an object of mass m at a distance h above the ground? Define the ground to be at x1 = 0. Then since the force is constant Work-Energy Theorem Now let’s use (11.2) to find an important relationship between work and energy. Let us define Wext to be the work done by all non-conservative forces. We call all of these forces the external forces. We can see from the definition of the potential energy that the work done to change altitude is just the opposite of the change in potential energy. So, using (11.2) and generalizing this to all potential energies, we can write where the sum is over the change in potential energies for each conservative force. Moving the potential energy to the right side of the equation, (12.2) This is the work-energy theorem,