Скачать или смотреть Hooke's Law Physics Problems - How to Calculate Energy and Forces on a Spring

Springs have some interesting properties that we examine in physics. Chief among those is that they have a resting or equilibrium length, and that stretching or compressing the spring from that resting length results in a force from the spring and in the storage of energy within the spring.

The amount of force that a spring pushes or pulls with depends on how far the spring is being stretched or compressed. More stretch or compression means more force. In fact, there's a linear relationship between those, which is described by Hooke's Law. The coefficient that relates stretch distance to the force on the spring is called the spring constant (or sometimes the force constant). Springs will always push or pull in such a way as to try to return the spring to its relaxed length.

Spring potential energy is the energy stored in a stretched or compressed spring. At the atomic scale, this is energy associated with pushing or pulling the atoms of the spring closer together or farther apart than they normally are, so this is a special case of something called "electric potential energy", which deals with the positions of charged particles.

Springs will often show up in problems involving forces and Newton's laws; check out this playlist for more information about those types of problems:

   • AP Physics 1 - Dynamics  

We also will see springs in energy problems frequently; check out this playlist for more to do with energy:

   • AP Physics 1 - Energy