The Trebuchet :: Physics Trebuchet History Papers

The Trebuchet The roots of the motorcar go back to at least the fifth century B.C. in China. In its most primitive form, it consisted of a pivoted glint with a ballista at one end and ropes at the other. A stone would be placed in the scarf bandage and a team of men would force the ropes, swinging the beam up into the air1.The trebucket reached the Mediterranean by the sixth century C.E. It displaced other forms of artillery and held its own until well after(prenominal) the coming of gunpowder. The trebuchet was instrumental in the rapid expansion of two the Islamic and the Mongol empires. It also played a part in the transmission of the Black Death, the epidemic of plague that swept Eurasia and the North Africa during the fourteenth century. Along the way it seems to have influenced both the development of clockwork and the theoretical analyzes of drift2.We will now look at the physics of a trebuchet. The trebuchet uses many different physics applications, we will look at a few of them. Basically a trebuchet is a fulcrum.First the goose egg of conservation. The setting of the trebuchet before firing is shown in Fig 1. A heavy counterweight of mass (M) (contained in a large bucket) on the end of the short arm of a sturdy beam was raised to some height while a smaller mass (m) (the rocket engine), was positioned on the end of the longer arm near or on the ground. In practice the projectile was usually placed in a strap hurtle attached to the end of the longer arm. However for simplicity, we shall ignore the sling and compensate for this omission by increasing the assumed space of the beam on the projectiles side. The counterweight was then allowed to fall so that the longer arm swung upward, the sling following, and the projectile was ultimately thrown from its container at some point near the top of the arc. The far end of the sling was attached to the arm by a rope in such a way that the release occurred at a launching burthen near the op timum value ( most likely by repeat trials) for the launch height. The launching position is shown in fig.2 where we have assumed that the projectile is released at the minute the entire beam is vertical. In the figures (a)=height of the pivot, (b)= length of the short arm, (c)= length of the long arm, while (v) and (V) are the velocities of (m) and (M), respectively, at the moment of launching.