Engineering and fabrication

Components?!?

Hey....can anybody PLEASE explain to me about "horizontal components" and "vertical components" in physics??? I have tried really hard to understand them...but in vain...soo all i am asking for is some explanation on them in SIMPLE WORDS P.S: I have a test coming up in 3 days.....soo i am in DIRE need of help!!!

Public Comments

1. Horizontal and vertical components are perpendicular to each other, what else can I say?


2. Think of the components as the shadow that a vector would cast on a horizontal or vertical line extending from its tail.

   So if you have a vector that extends diagonally upward and to the right like this: /

   and you shone a light down upon it, it would create a shadow that looks like this: _ (maybe a little narrower)

   if you shone a light at it from the right, it would make a shadow like this: | (maybe a little shorter)

   The lengths of those shadows are the components.

   To make it on paper, you would just make a right angled-triangle with the vector being the hypotenuse.

   You can then use your trigonometry (SOH CAH TOA or pythagorean theorem) to find the lengths of them.

   Hope this helps!



3. Step 1. Define a direction as horizontal .

   Step 2. Define a direction as vertical. This vertical should be 90 degrees (at a right angle) to the direction you defined as horizontal.

   These two directions will define a plane. pretend you can only move inside this plane for a second.

   Step 3. push something so that it goes in a direction that is in the plane you defined but not exactly parallel to either direction. like firing a cannon ball out of a cannon at a 45 degree angle to the horizontal.

   Step 4. at that point, the cannon ball is moving up and it is also moving right. (it could be left, choice is up to you.)

   The speed it moves up is its vertical component of its velocity.

   The speed it moves right is its horizonta component of its velocity.

   now, it has a "speed", how fast is it moving through the air, but velocity is also about direction. If you graphed how high it was in the air with respect to time, and only that, forgetting about where it was left and right, you would see it would go up to a certain height, level off, and go back down to the ground.

   But if you graphed how far it travelled to the right, you would find it would have a constant increase in distance until a point, then it would be a flat line where it stopped.

   Components are a measure of a scalar quantity in a direction if you ignore other perpendicular (technically orthogonal) directions.

   I hoped that helped.



4. The best way to think of them is, to think about a triangle. Remember that the hypotenuse can be broken down into legs. Therefore if i have a line from point (0,0) to (2,2). I can break it down: go right from (0,0) to (2,0) and then up from (2,0) to (2,2). Thats all you do when you are using vectors. Draw a triangle if it helps, the "vertical" component is the leg of the triangle that goes up or down, the horizontal component is the one which goes right or left.