Ball:
Disk:

Comparing constant acceleration in 1-dimension and rotational kinematics

Worksheet for this simulation

In this simulation, you can compare the motion of a ball, which is influenced by gravity alone, to that of a disk, which has a constant angular acceleration directed counter-clockwise.

You can see the ball's motion diagram, with the position marked at 0.5 s intervals. You can also see the disk's motion diagram, with the position marked at 0.5 s intervals. You can then either see graphs of the ball's position, velocity, and acceleration, all as a function of time, or graphs of the disk's angular position, angular velocity, and angular acceleration, all as a function of time.

Simulation written by Andrew Duffy, and first posted on 6-04-2018. Updated 06-18-2019 to fix a small typo.

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.

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