Professional Documents
Culture Documents
From ancient times man has always been keen in devising machines of different kinds for one
basic reason: relieving humans from tasks that are tedious and involve massive efforts. Pulley mechanisms are one of
these machines that have been serving mankind since the day they were invented.
A pulley mechanism consists of a wheel and string assembly and is designed for lifting heavier loads through a
comparatively lower magnitude of effort. The mechanism can be better understood by studying the behaviour of a
simple pulley."
Simple Pulley: A simple pulley basically consists of two components, the wheel and the string; the wheel may be made
up of wood or metal and includes a grove cut along its circumferential periphery. The string is allowed to slide or pass
through this groove with a load that is to be lifted fixed at one of its ends and an effort applied at the other end in order
to lift the load. The pulley wheel is supported over a rigid frame about its central axis.
The applied effort through pulling of the string rotates the pulley and pulls the load upwards, helping the load to be lifted
with ease.
A classic example of this mechanism can be witnessed over wells where the pulley and rope are used for lifting waterfilled buckets.
Some important observations made by assessing this mechanism which may prove useful while calculating them are
described below:
The weight of the pulley block can be ignored as its too small compared to the load thats
required to be lifted or rather moving heavier weights become more desirable for efficient response from these
devices.
The friction developed on either side of the pulley across the string contact can also be
Through some observation it becomes obvious that for displacing the weight by some distance, say x, the
applied effort has to move through a distance nx, where n is the total number of pulleys in the system.
Therefore, the velocity ratio can be expressed as nx/x = n
And as usual MA and the efficiency may be written as given for the first system of pulleys.
It is quite identical to the first system; however by looking at the figure it becomes clear that
the operations involved are just in the reverse process.
The velocity ratio of the system can be tracked by following a unit movement of the weight.
Suppose, the attached weight is moved by a distance of x meters by the effort applied at P, this will cause an
instantaneous slackening of the strings involved.
For supporting the action, the strings will go through a sequential tightening movement through the pulley rotations.
Therefore the slackening of string 1 (assuming to be equal to x meters) is compensated by pulley number two, which
comes down and covers a distance of 2x meters.
Also with slackening of string 2, x1 gets pulled across a distance of 2x x = x meters.
Continuing further, with x1 being pulled through x meters, x2 gets pulled through a length of 2x +x = 3x = (2 2 1)x.
The procedure is followed on to keep the relative position of pulley 3 constant and string 3 is pulled across a distance of
(2 3x x) = 7x = (23 1)x, and finally string x4, which is actually the effort, crosses a distance of (2 7x + x) = 15x =
(24 1)x meters.
Therefore the VR of the system can be equated as = Distance Covered by Effort/Distance Covered by Weight = (2 4
1)x/x = 24 1, for the present example which consists of 4 pulleys.
In general for a particular third system of pulley having n number of pulleys, VR = 2 n 1.
MA and may be taken as discussed for the previous systems.