Week 22 - Mechanical Advantage, Speed Ratio and Gears

2. Complex Machines and Energy

Lesson 5

Read pages 269 - 276

Lesson 5: Analyze Mechanical Devices
Complex Machines and Energy

You can easily see that a ramp or a pair of scissors would be a simple machine. But what about your bicycle, or a winch on a truck? These do not seem as easy to explain unless we look carefully to see how they are made up. These two complex machines are actually made from combinations of simple machines working together.

Although many of the machines that we use in our daily lives are the simple machines that we studied in our last lesson, complex machines are required for some jobs. A complex machine is really a number of simple machines functioning together through some type of linkages. This means that the whole machine can be thought of as a system and the simple machines form which it is made are subsystems. In this lesson, we will look at the subsystems that form some complex machines.

No Exercise in this section!