Block and pulley, showing energy bar graphs


Show energy for:
Mass of the block
0.1 kg 2.0 kg
1.2
Mass of the pulley
0.0 kg 2.0 kg
1.0
The pulley is a

The simulation shows the flow of energy for a block that is connected to a pulley by a string wrapped around the outside of the pulley. The subscript 1 refers to the block, and p refers to the pulley. You can view the energy from five different perspectives, ranging from defining the system to be the Earth and the block and the pulley, to just the block or just the pulley.

Note that the simulation uses 10.0 m/s/s for g.

See if you can make sense of all the different perspectives on energy. Note that the system starts from rest. In some views, you see the work done by gravity on the block, or the work done by tension on the block, or on the pulley. The labels are either above or below the bars, not beside them. U is gravitational potential energy, W is work, and K is kinetic energy.

Simulation first posted on 9-1-2016. Written by Andrew Duffy
Updated 10-23-18 with subscripts "b" for block, highlighted custom buttons, and a title on the graph showing the system.

Creative Commons License
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: