Standing on a Beam Supported by a Cable

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A worker stands at a distance along a beam whose left end is set into a wall and whose right end is suspended from a cable attached to the wall at height
. The beam has mass
=20 kg and length
=8 m. The Demonstration calculates the tension
of the beam at the wall and the tension
of the cable in newtons (N), with angles
and
, respectively.
Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny (November 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
For the conditions of static equilibrium, we have
,
,
where and
are the forces in the
and
directions,
is the mass of the worker,
is the gravitational acceleration,
is the weight of the beam and
),
with being the torque and the factor
being the center of mass.
Permanent Citation