You're getting very sleeping cause I'm pulling the string very slowly

A pendulum consists of a point-mass object of mass m m suspended from a pivot by a massless string of length L L . The pendulum is swinging freely in the vertical plane. By what factor does the amplitude of oscillation change if the string is very slowly shortened by a factor of k = 2 k=2 ?

Details and assumptions

The amplitude of oscillation is very small.


The answer is 1.68.

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1 solution

David Mattingly Staff
May 13, 2014

The average tension of the string (with m m as the mass of the object, L L as the length of the pendulum, g g as the gravitational constant and θ o \theta_o as the angular amplitude of oscillation) is:

T = m g cos θ + m L θ ˙ 2 = m g ( 1 θ 2 ) + m L θ ˙ 2 = m g ( 1 + θ o 2 4 ) \overline{T}=mg\overline{\cos{\theta}} + mL\overline{\dot{\theta}^2} = mg(1-\overline{\theta^2}) + mL\overline{\dot{\theta}^2} = mg(1+\frac{\theta_o^2}{4})

Use that θ ( t ) = θ o cos ( g l t + ϕ ) \theta(t) = \theta_o \cos(\sqrt{\frac{g}{l}} t+\phi) . The oscillation energy and potential energy is E = m g L cos θ o m g L ( 1 θ o 2 2 ) E= -mgL \cos{\theta_o} \approx -mgL(1-\frac{\theta_o^2}{2}) , and we balance the work done by shorten the pendulum length with the change in the oscillation energy to get:

d E = m g d L + 1 2 m g θ o 2 d L + m g L θ o d θ o = d A = T d L = m g ( 1 + θ o 2 4 ) d L L d θ o = 3 4 θ o d L dE=-mgdL+\frac12 mg\theta_o^2 dL + mgL \theta_o d\theta_o =dA = -TdL = -mg(1+\frac{\theta_o^2}{4})dL \Rightarrow L d\theta_o = -\frac34 \theta_o dL

θ o L 3 / 4 \Rightarrow \theta_o \sim L^{-3/4}

So the change in the amplitude must be k 3 / 4 = 1.68 k^{3/4} = 1.68

Can't we conserve angular momentum about the pivot?? It yields a diff answer

saptarshi dasgupta - 2 years, 7 months ago

Can't you just use the adiabatic theorem? :P

Finn Hulse - 7 years ago

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If I may ask, what is the adiabatic theorem?

Doge Doggo - 5 years, 12 months ago

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