Chapter 10
Work and Energy in 3-Dimensional Motion
10.1 NORMAL AND TANGENTIAL ACCELERATIONS
In the previous chapter we had obtained expressions for the velocity and acceleration vectors of a particle in the plane polar coordinate system, by writing the components of these vectors in the directions of er, eθ. In the special case when the path of the particle is a circle the expression for the acceleration simplified to (See Eq. 9.20):
Natural circular motion is rare. It can occur only in a uniform magnetic field. In the case of gravitational and electrostatic forces, the general trajectory is either an ellipse or a hyperbola, as we have seen ...
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