Worlds Strongest Men Competition
Yesterday I was watching the Worlds Strongest Men Competition on ESPN and they were doing an event where they had a bus tied to them and then they had to pull it a certain distance by pulling on a rope that was in front of them and walking with it. There was a lot of physics involved, and it was quite a sight to see. First of all, I noticed that the hardest part was to get the bus to start moving whether it was because of the static friction being more then the kinetic friction or something to do with rotational motion, I am not sure. Also, while watching I noticed that as they pulled on the ropes they were leaning very far forward and making pretty small angles with the ground. I thought that this was a very good idea because while pulling standing straight up some of their effort would be turned into vertical forces, which would be wasted. By being more horizontal with the ground, their horizontal force would be greater found by solving Fcos and the closer this angle is to zero, the more of their force would be put into the horizontal direction. The best time to pull the bus was right around one minute, and after looking on google again I will estimate that the bus weighs about 22000 pounds, and from this I can estimate that the work they did was around 396000J over the entire pull.
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