The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-
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The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-
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To be more precise, however, its not the torque from the rotation that causes the snowmobile to pitch downward, its the sudden change in rotational inertia of the track.
I find myself disagreeing, unless somehow the geometry of the track changes. The rotational inertia of anything is simply a function of its mass and the geometric distribution of that mass. As long as the mass and its geometry don't change significantly, the rotational inertia doesn't either.
We can discuss what happens in terms of the torque between the track and the rest of the snowmobile, or equivalently we can look at this as a conservation of angular momentum situation. From the view of a stationary observer to the "right" of the snowmobile, the track is rotating clockwise--hence it has a clockwise angular momentum. If its rotational speed increases as it leaves the ramp, then its angular momentum increases also. With no net external torques on the snowmobile-track system, then the body of the snowmobile will acquire a counterclockwise angular momentum, rotating in a ccw direction so the total angular momentum doesn't change. This of course can also be explained by a Newton's law action-reaction pair between the track and the snowmobile, causing opposite torques and angular momentum, but throughout this, the track's rotational inertia stays about the same.
Bruno Schmidt
[email protected]
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Snowmobile speed response to archive thread
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