written by Tom Dooling, Aaron Titus, Jeffrey Register, and Matt Carnaghi

A weak spring is connected at one end to a rotor turning at constant angular velocity. The spring extends to a stretched length as determined by the spring mass, rest length, spring constant, rotor radius and rotor angular velocity. When released from the rotor, the inner end of the spring pulls away as expected, causing a wave to travel down the spring as it collapses. During this time
interval, the outer end of the spring continues to move along its original circular path in uniform circular motion, as if the spring were still connected to the rotor. This is analogous to the effect of
a hanging Slinky released from rest whose bottom end remains at a fixed position above the ground until a wave from the top of the Slinky reaches the bottom of the Slinky.

• Download rotating_spring.pdf - 751kb Adobe PDF Document

Last Modified August 19, 2015

by Matthew Carnaghi and Aaron Titus (High Point University), Tom Dooling (UNC Pembroke), Jeff Regester (Greensboro Day School)

A poster presented at the NC AAPT Section Meeting describing the experiment.

• Download RotatingSpringReleased_Poster.pdf - 1089kb Adobe PDF Document

Last Modified August 21, 2015

Supplemental data and graphs to accompany the article describing the Rotating Spring Experiment.

• Download rotor_spring_data.pdf - 253kb Adobe PDF Document

Last Modified August 21, 2015

A Tracker experiment file showing the motion of a spring after it is released
from a rotating turntable.  Open this archive using the Tracker video modeling tool.

• Download pasco-spring-tracker-archive.trz - 889kb Tracker Document Set

Last Modified April 20, 2023

This file has previous versions.

A Tracker experiment file showing the motion of a slinky after it is released
from a rotating turntable.  Open this archive using the Tracker video modeling tool.

• Download slinky-tracker-archive.trz - 1900kb Tracker Document Set

Last Modified April 20, 2023

This file has previous versions.

A video clip showing the motion of a spring after it is released
from a rotating turntable.

• Download example-pasco-spring.mp4 - 620kb video/mp4

Last Modified August 21, 2015

An EJS Java simulation showing and analyzing the motion of a spring released from a rotating turntable.

• Download rotating_pasco_spring.jar - 1206kb Java Archive File

Last Modified August 23, 2015

This file has previous versions.

An EJS Java simulation showing and analyzing the motion of a slinky released from a rotating turntable.

• Download rotating_slinky_spring.jar - 1206kb Java Archive File

Last Modified August 23, 2015

This file has previous versions.