Calculating Tangential Acceleration On A Curve

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HomeAcademics & The Arts ArticlesScience ArticlesPhysics ArticlesCalculating Tangential Acceleration on a CurveBySteven Holzner Updated2016-03-26 17:21:03From the bookPhysics I For DummiesShare

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In physics, tangential acceleration is a measure of how the tangential velocity of a point at a certain radius changes with time. Tangential acceleration is just like linear acceleration, but it’s specific to the tangential direction, which is relevant to circular motion. You start with the magnitude of the angular acceleration,

which tells you how the speed of the object in the tangential direction is changing.

For example, when you start a lawn mower, a point on the tip of one of its blades starts at a tangential velocity of zero and ends up with a tangential velocity with a pretty large magnitude. So how do you determine the point’s tangential acceleration? You can start with the following equation, which relates velocity to acceleration

Tangential velocity, v, equals

so you can plug in this information in the previous equation to relate the tangential acceleration to the change in angular velocity:

Because the radius is constant here, the equation becomes

However,

the angular acceleration, so the equation becomes

Translated into layman’s terms, this says tangential acceleration equals angular acceleration multiplied by the radius.

About This Article

This article is from the book: 

Physics I For Dummies

About the book author:

Dr. Steven Holzner has written more than 40 books about physics and programming. He was a contributing editor at PC Magazine and was on the faculty at both MIT and Cornell. He has authored Dummies titles including Physics For Dummies and Physics Essentials For Dummies. Dr. Holzner received his PhD at Cornell.

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