Discovering the Force on a Mass Attached to a Wire for Beginners

[lostmoose2121]

Hello I'm new here and I don't know if this is the right place but I just got my "electrical engineering" book in the mail and I started to flip through it. It look really interesting and all so I decided to read some of the examples it had I figured most of them out but got to this question and I just don't get it! I may be a complete idiot when you see the question but I just need some explanations.

the question is: Find the force acting vertically downwards on a mass of 200 g attached to a wire.

so how do you figure this out?

 

[berkeman]

Hello I'm new here and I don't know if this is the right place but I just got my "electrical engineering" book in the mail and I started to flip through it. It look really interesting and all so I decided to read some of the examples it had I figured most of them out but got to this question and I just don't get it! I may be a complete idiot when you see the question but I just need some explanations.

the question is: Find the force acting vertically downwards on a mass of 200 g attached to a wire.

so how do you figure this out?

Welcome to the PF. Doesn't sound like a question from an EE book, but whatever. The traditional way to handle this question is by using a free body diagram. Does your book explain that? If not, you can use www.wikipedia.org to learn more about FBDs. Once you do that, come back to this thread and post your work, and we can check it out.

 

[nlightner]

Hello and welcome to the world of science and engineering! It's great that you are interested in learning more about electrical engineering and have already started exploring your book. To answer your question, let's break down the problem into smaller parts.

First, we need to understand the concept of force. Force is a physical quantity that describes the push or pull on an object. It is measured in Newtons (N) and is represented by the symbol F. In this case, we are looking for the force acting on a mass attached to a wire, so we can represent it as F = ma, where m is the mass and a is the acceleration.

Next, we need to determine the mass of the object, which is given as 200 g. However, we need to convert this to kilograms (kg) because the unit of force, Newtons, is based on the SI unit system. To convert g to kg, we divide by 1000, so the mass of the object is 0.2 kg.

Now, we need to find the acceleration. The question does not specify if the object is moving or at rest, so we can assume that it is at rest, meaning the acceleration is 0 m/s^2. Therefore, the force acting on the mass attached to the wire is F = (0.2 kg)(0 m/s^2) = 0 N. This means that there is no force acting on the object vertically downwards.

I hope this explanation helps you understand the concept of force and how to solve this type of problem. Keep exploring and learning, and don't be afraid to ask questions. That's what science is all about! Good luck on your journey as a scientist.