Applications of Uniform Circular Motion

Uniform circular motion is not just a textbook abstraction -- it underlies a whole family of everyday and engineering situations. This section works through four such applications in turn: a vehicle turning on a flat (unbanked) circular road, a vehicle driven in horizontal circles on the inside of a vertical cylindrical wall (the 'well of death' stunt), a vehicle turning on a road whose surface is deliberately tilted (banked), and a bob revolving on a string to trace a cone (the conical pendulum). In every case the underlying physics is identical -- identify which real force, or combination of real forces, supplies the necessary centripetal force $\frac{mv^2}{r}$ -- but the specific force involved (friction, a wall's normal reaction, a banked road's tilted normal reaction, or …