Warm-up: Drawing free-body diagrams
Free-body diagrams are a helpful tool for keeping the magnitude and direction of applied forces clear. Keeping clear and detailed free-body diagrams will help you interpret the results of your experiments.
Free body diagrams: Warm-up
Draw the following free-body diagrams (FBDs) of the scenarios represented in the schematics below. We encourage you to try and draw each FBD yourself before attempting the matching game. When drawing each FBD, think about what the length of each arrow represents.
a) A shoe in free fall (remember Lab 1).
b) A shoe at rest on a table.
c) A shoe at rest on a ramp inclined at angle θ.
d) A shoe accelerating down a ramp at angle φ.
Before moving on!
Make sure you have drawn and understood each free-body diagram from the examples! They will be useful in the exercises to come.
