Banked turn

The simulation shows a car going around a banked turn. The car is, we hope, experiencing uniform circular motion, moving in a horizontal circle. In the simulation, you see the rear view of the car, an overhead view of the car, as well as the car's free-body diagram.

Using the sliders, you can investigate under what conditions the car can safely get around the turn. As you adjust the sliders, you will notice the background behind the speed slider changing. Green shows the speeds at which the car can safely go around the curve, while red shows the speeds at which the car will slip. If slipping happens, a red arrow showing whether the car slides toward the outside or the inside of the curve will appear on both views of the car.

Simulation written by Andrew Duffy, and first posted on 5-24-2018.

This work by Andrew Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This simulation can be found in the collection at http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/classroom.html.

The counter has been running on this page since 8-10-2018. The number of people accessing the page since then is: