Chapter 11 Oscillatory motion and vibration
11.1 Simple harmonic motion
When a body oscillates backwards and forwards so that every part of its motion recurs regularly, we say that it has periodic motion. For example, a piston attached to a connecting rod and crankshaft, moving up and down inside the cylinder, has periodic motion, as you may have noticed when studying this system as a mechanism in section 9.2.
If we study the motion of the piston P carefully (Figure 11.1), we note that when the piston moves towards A its velocity v is from right to left. At A it comes instantaneously to rest and reverses direction. So before reaching A the piston ...
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