A6 Adam Beckmeyer CHEN2610 Sect001 Bonus D Due: 8 April 2013 If a dog runs fast enough to break the ring

to which the leash he's on is attached, distorting the ring in a specific, measurable way, how could one best calculate the speed at which the dog was running when he broke ring without subjecting the dog to the same experience. The problem has no true algebraic, first-principles solution, but the minimum speed to distend the chain as seen in the pictures can be calculated if one makes a few key assumptions. Let F be the force exerted by the ring on the dog. Let m be the mass of the dog. Let V be the velocity of the dog. Let F be the force exerted on the dog over the distance l. From the energy equation, we know that:
mV = Fl 2
2

This equation assumes that all kinetic energy of the dog is transferred into work on the ring. Thus the dog's velocity would be zero when it had broken the ring. It also assumes that the force the ring exerts on the dog is constant with respect to l. If we rearrange this we get the following expression for minimum velocity:
V=

2Fl m

For this expression we could measure how far the ring was distended in the picture to approximate l, weight the dog to find m, and hang increasingly heavier weights from the ring until it distends to approximate F. This is, at best, a crude estimate of the actual velocity. It relies on ludicrous assumptions. A better approach would be suspending the ring and attaching to it a mass equal to the mass of the dog. That mass could then be dropped from different heights so that the mass is traveling at different speeds when it exerts a force on the ring. When a ring distended in a manner similar to that shown in the picture, the velocity of the mass at the ring could easily be calculated from the energy equation. Because the ring isn't symmetrical, this procedure might have to be repeated multiple times from each tested height with the ring rotated to different positions. While this problem could be analyzed using pi-groups of all the pertinent variables, including the strain modulus, it isn't necessary. Pi-groups are useful when graphing a wide range of fluctuating variables. In this case, we're interested in only the manner in which the ring bends and the velocity of the mass when it begins pulling the ring. That's why such a simple test could be effective here. Once a good match was found for ring distortion at some height, h, above the height where the mass exerts force on the ring, the following equation would predict the dog's velocity.
V = 2gh