Christopher Weller

Rasmussen College

PHY4060 Understanding Ourselves Through Physics

Vincent Rossi

May 15th, 2022

Pulley System and the Law of Gravity

For this project I used my weight bench to show how a pulley system works and how a weight and the law of gravity affects how it moves (Intuitive Mechanics, 1985). Pulley systems don’t always use weights or gravity in some cases they use motorized methods to make them move one example of this is a dairy bottling plant. There they use a pulley system suspended in the air to move freshly made jugs from one area to the next (Intuitive Mechanics, 1985).

The first step I did in my experiment was set the weight on my weight bench and utilized the upper pull-down bar to show how the pulley system works (Intuitive Mechanics, 1985). By pulling down on the bar the weight rose higher and higher the farther I pulled down. When I let pressure off the bar the weight and gravity caused the bar to raise back to the top and the weight to go back down (Intuitive Mechanics, 1985).

As you can see from the images below the pulley system is a very useful method and has been used for many years across the world (Intuitive Mechanics, 1985). They are used mainly today in manufacturing plants where very heavy items are moved from one are to another. They are even used in construction of roads and bridges with the use of a crane which is able to move and hold these heavy pieces of cement and steel up to higher locations or even to hold them in place while they are welded or fastened into place (Intuitive Mechanics, 1985).

References

Intuitive Mechanics (Weights & Pulleys). (1985). The Ninth Mental Measurements Yearbook.