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arXiv · 1908.10363

Revisiting the Coulomb-Damped Harmonic Oscillator

Joseph A Rizcallah
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Abstract

The force of dry friction is studied extensively in introductory physics but its effect on oscillations is hardly ever mentioned. Instead, to provide a mathematically tractable introduction to damping, virtually all authors adopt a viscous resistive force. While exposure to linear damping is of paramount importance to the student of physics, the omission of Coulomb damping might have a negative impact on the way the students conceive of the subject. In the paper, we propose to approximate the action of Coulomb friction on a harmonic oscillator by a sinusoidal resistive force whose amplitude is the model's only free parameter. We seek the value of this parameter that yields the best fit and obtain a closed-form analytic solution, which is shown to nicely fit the numerical one.

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Joseph A Rizcallah. 2019-08-26. Revisiting the Coulomb-Damped Harmonic Oscillator. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6404/ab33d1

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