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Passive damping – Bathroom scales
You step on your bathroom scales to find your body mass. The idea is that gravity acts on your mass to exert a force that depresses a platform. The depression of the platform depends on the force a…
Previously the platform would have been mounted on springs but now it is more likely to be a sensor ( post 18.9), in which an upper surface deforms (perhaps not enough for you to see), but the principle remains the same. For case 1 (critical damping), the graph is a smooth curve showing x moving to its final value. We are still seeking a linear combination that has x= h when t= 0 and then starts to decrease as t increases, to provide a mathematical description of the physical system.
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