Atwood Machine • Atwood Machine - two objects are connected by a light string over a massless pulley • Ideal pulleys are frictionless and massless (they add no inertia to the system) • Tension is constant in a light string passing over an ideal pulley Solving Atwood Machine Problems 1. Adopt a sign convention for positive and negative motion 2. Draw a free body diagram for each mass 3. Write Newton’s Second Law equations for each mass 4. Solve for unknowns Alternate Solution • Analyze the system as a whole Mass and Pulley on a Ramp
