Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Explain Wave Motion


Let us understand what is Wave Motion,

The easiest wave to visualize is a water wave. When a pebble is dropped in a calm pool of water, ripples travel out from the point where the pebble enters the water. The disturbance travels out from the center of the pattern, but the water does not travel with the wave. Mechanical waves—such as water waves, waves on a rope, waves in a spring, and sound waves—have two general characteristics:

* A disturbance is in some identifiable medium.

*Energy is transmitted from place to place, but the medium does not travel between two places.

For the sake of simplicity, idealized one-dimensional waves on a rope and two-dimensional water surface waves with no friction-like forces provide the wave model. For ease of analysis, a pulse that is a single short wave will be used to illustrate wave characteristics that also hold true for more complex waves.

Hope the explanation was useful, now let us study about the types of waves.

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