Dapopeah said:
"If the plane moves, then there is upward force. " That"s the point, Galiem. It doesn"t move according to the question.
/sigh The entirety of the screenshots forum should understand pretty much all of the physics involved in this by now. I"m pretty sure that even Matt could give a lecture on it by this point.
The plane does move forward. I could give you a thousand conditional models where it does this, but that is not needed because the plane universally moves forward.
There are three reasons for this, and I really can"t type this in again after this or the (what? two?) folks who don"t think that this thread is too long already will by then, and then everyone will get together to eat my lunch. I want to keep my cornbread, damnit!
First, and of equal importance with the second reason, the wheels are not providing the forward thrust. When you spin out the wheels in your car, you lose your forward push. When the plane"s wheels are ineffective, you keep your forward push in the plane because the engines are pushing against the air. If the forward force depended on the ground, then planes would not fly, because there is no ground in the sky.
The second reason is the friction in the system. The two most important and most influencial sources of friction are the contact between the wheel and the belt, and the contact between the belt and the wheels that it is wrapped around. If you add these two, then you get the resistance of the belt to movement.
If we pretend that the entire forward push is transfered to the belt (and it isn"t), then the friction is not equal to the forward push because the coefficient of friction is pretty much always less than one. This means that the wheel"s grip on the belt and the belt"s grip on its components are both less than the force of the plane"s forward thrust.
Thus, while the belt can match the rotation of the wheels, it can not match the force of the plane"s thrust.
Even if both coeffs are equal to one, then the wheels spin out, the plane skids, and although it takes more power than if the wheels were spinning, it can still take off.
The third reason is that the belt is a closed loop, which means that the total momentum of particles on its surface is zero, always. This means that the belt can not, under any circumstances whatsoever, act as a sink for the plane"s momentum. In other words, whatever velocity the plane builds up, it keeps.
There are two reasons that I"m explaining this again. The first is that I love physics, I love unique and creative problems, and I wish that everyone could have a general understanding of it. The second is one of those three.
Nonetheless, if you still don"t understand why the plane takes off, then there"s nothing that can be done for that. If we get to make a scaled down model of this like we want to out here on my end, I will most certainly record the experiment, and then you"ll get to see what is meant here.
Coffee and TV said:
Under those conditions, my penis could take off.
Damn you C&TV! I just put my penis on a conveyor belt, and now it just hurts like hell!