Driving Around a Bend Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Driving Around a Bend - Assignment Example Higher is the speed and more is the angle of inclination. Many times, the turn is too sharp and/or the speed is too much to negotiate by the motorists and the vehicle skids causing fatal accidents. A car driver, unfortunately, cannot lean like a motorcyclist and therefore, he needs something else to help him negotiate a bend without skidding and that is banking on the road. In case of banking, there is an upward slope on the road from inner side towards the outer side of the circle. So the question is by what angle a motorcyclist should lean and also, what should be the angle of banking on the road near a bend to avoid skidding off a vehicle. These two are an essentially same problem and have been treated analytically in the subsequent section. Suddenly a bend comes on the road and he has to move along a circular arc. Moving along a circular arc requires centripetal acceleration and there must be a force to produce this acceleration. If the motorcycle goes on a horizontal circular path, this resultant force will also be horizontal. Let us consider a motorcycle of mass ‘m’ moving at a speed ‘v’ is negotiating a bend of radius ‘r’ and the road is horizontal. Therefore, the external forces acting on the vehicle are the following: As the road is horizontal, the normal reaction force ‘R’ is vertically upward. The only horizontal force that can act towards the center of the circular path is friction F. This is static friction and self-adjustable. The tires get a tendency to skid outward and the frictional force which opposes the skidding acts towards the center. Thus for the safe turn i.e. for the turn without skidding