Weight Suspended by Two Cables
Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
This Demonstration calculates the tension forces in two cables that support a weight.
[more]
Contributed by: Rachael L. Baumann (September 2017)
Additional contributions by: John L. Falconer
(University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
For equal cable lengths, a force balance in the direction is done to determine the cable tension:
,
rearranging to solve for tension:
,
where is tension (N),
is the angle (degrees),
is the mass of the ball (kg) and
is acceleration due to gravity.
When the cable lengths are unequal, force balances in the and directions are done to calculate the tension forces in each cable:
,
where and are the tensions in the left and right cables (N), and and are the angles of the left and right cables (degrees).
Permanent Citation