A car moves in a circle at constant speed. What is the direction of the resultant force acting on the car?
Answers
Answer:
There is a simple way to answer this.
Imagine you are driving a vehicle on a straight road, and suddenly you come up to an intersection where you must turn. You turn, and find another intersection right after the one you just took. “This seems a bit strange,” you tell yourself. Right as you make the turn, you recognize a feeling you had not long before… at the other intersection! What was that feeling?
It was the feeling of being tugged to the side of you vehicle, opposite of the direction you were turning. Why didn’t you just fly out of the window? Surely there must have been something keeping you inside of the car?
You realize that your seat belt (or car door, if you enjoy daily risking your life) pulled you in the direction you decided to turn, possibly very painfully depending on how sharply you turn.
The seat belt represents the force applied to you as you turn the car, and this force points in vectorially in the direction you (must) turn in. A car moving at constant speed in a circle is really just a car constantly turning in the same direction over and over again.
Draw a force vector for several steps during the journey, and you will find that it always points toward the middle of the circle.
♥️Aakanshi♥️
Here is your answer:-
There is a centripetal force acting on the car that pushes it toward the center of the circular path.
However the car will always have a velocity in a direction tangent to the circular path.
