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Engineering LibreTexts

9: Spring Models

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Our final tool for mastering complexity is making spring models. The essential characteristics of an ideal spring, the transferable abstractions, are that it produces a restoring force proportional to the displacement from equilibrium and stores an energy proportional to the displacement squared. These seemingly specific requirements are met far more widely than we might expect. Spring models thereby connect chemical bonds (Section 9.1), xylophone notes (Section 9.2.3), gravitational radiation (Section 9.3.3), and the colors of the sky and sunsets (Section 9.4).


This page titled 9: Spring Models is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sanjoy Mahajan (MIT OpenCourseWare) .

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