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We’re all familiar with the phrase, “too much of a good thing.” As a professional engineer, I’ve often found this to be true. No matter the subject involved, there inevitably comes a point when undesirable tradeoffs occur. We’ll begin our look at this phenomenon in relation to compound pulleys today, and we’ll see how the pulley arrangement we’ve been working with encounters a rope length tradeoff. Today’s arrangement has a lot of pulleys lifting an urn a short distance. We’ll be working with two distance/length factors and observe what happens when the number of pulleys is increased. Last time we saw how the compound pulley is essentially a work input-output device, which makes use of distance factors. In our example below, the first distance/length factor, d1, pertains to the distance the urn is lifted above the ground. The second factor, d2, pertains to the length of rope Mr. Toga extracts from the pulley while actively lifting. It’s obvious that some tradeoff has occurred just by looking at the two lengths of rope in the image below as compared to last week. What we’ll see down the road is that this also affects mechanical advantage. The compound pulley here consists of 16 pulleys, therefore it provides a mechanical advantage, MA, of 16. For a refresher on how MA is determined, see our preceding blog.
Rope Length Tradeoff in a Compound Pulley
With an MA of 16 and the urn’s weight, W, at 40 pounds, we compute the force, F, Mr. Toga must exert to actively lift the urn higher must be greater than, F > W ÷ MA F > 40 Lbs. ÷ 16 F > 2.5 Lbs. Although the force required to lift the urn is a small fraction of the urn’s weight, Mr. Toga must work with a long and unwieldy length of rope. How long? We’ll find out next time when we’ll take a closer look at the relationship between d1 and d2. Copyright 2016 – Philip J. O’Keefe, PE Engineering Expert Witness Blog ____________________________________ |
