TA's Name:____________________ Section: ____ Your Name: _________________________________ Physics 2214 Assignment 4

Concepts: Sound waves Standing waves Standing waves on strings Standing sound waves in pipes Boundary conditions Reflection and transmission of Waves

Reading: Lecture notes 6 and 7 (sections on standing waves), and 10 and 11 (sections on wave interaction with boundaries, reflection and transmission). Y&F, Vol. 1, Chapter 15. Assignment: Due in homework boxes opposite 125 Clark Hall before 430 pm on Tuesday September 21, 2010. Please turn in this sheet stapled to the top of your work. 1. Sound waves in air. (a) The speed of sound in air at 20C and 1 atm is ~343 m/s. How does this compare with the rms speed of the molecules due to their thermal energy? Equate the average thermal average energy for molecules in an ideal gas of 3kBT/2 to our usual expression for kinetic energy K=1/2 mv2, and solve for v. Assume that air is made entirely of N2, which has a mass of 28 amu. Do the relative magnitudes of these speeds make physical sense? (Think about how the sound energy is transmitted through the gas. Is a gas so dense that the molecules are always in contact?) (b) A sound wave in air at 20C and 1 atm has a frequency of 1 kHz and a pressure 5 amplitude of 3 10 Pa. (This value is called the threshold of hearingthe smallest pressure amplitude that a person with excellent hearing can hear.) What is the displacement amplitude? Compare it to the size of an atom (0.1 nm to 0.5 nm). (c) Now consider a 1 kHz sound wave at the threshold of pain, which corresponds to a pressure amplitude of 30 Pa. What is the displacement amplitude now? (d) How does the maximum speed of the air molecules in their back and forth motion in the sound wave of (c) compare with their rms thermal speed in (a)? 2. Waves on a spring. In lecture we saw longitudinal waves on a "Slinky", i.e., a spring. What determines the speed of these waves? We can analyze this problem using the same approach as for sound waves, where now the relevant elasticity that opposes compression of a segment of length x is the spring constant ksp rather than the bulk modulus B. Apply Newton's second law, and show that if the spring has mass m and length L, then the wave speed is v = L k sp / m . (We've used ksp so as not to be confused with the wavenumber k.) Hint: the spring constant of

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a spring segment of length x is not ksp; if you apply the same force to that segment and to the whole spring, the whole spring will stretch a lot more. 3. Standing waves on a string. A string is clamped at its ends and vibrates in its fundamental mode. The traveling waves responsible for this vibration have speed v, frequency f and amplitude A. What is the amplitude of the strings motion at (i) x=0, (ii) x = /6 and (iii) x = /2 from its left end? Standing waves on a guitar. The E2 string of a guitar has a fundamental frequency of 82 Hz. [Information given in square brackets may be interesting to those who know something about music or the guitar, but is not needed to work the problem.]

4.

(a) The oscillating length of a guitar string [between the nut and the saddle] is 25 inches. What is the wave speed on the E-string? (b) What is the next lowest standing wave frequency on the E-string? (c) Suppose the string extends from x = 0 to x = L. If you press the string firmly against the neck at x = L/6 [at the 3rd fret], only the side of the string with length 5L/6 can vibrate. Assume the tension is the same as before. What is the lowest frequency now? [The note youre playing is G.] (d) If instead you touch a finger lightly to the string at x = L/6, the entire length L of string can vibrate but you force a node at the point x = L/6. What is the lowest standing wave frequency now? [This is how you play a natural or open-string harmonic. The note sounded is B5.] 5. The male voice. The human vocal tract is a pipe that extends about 17 cm from the lips to the vocal folds (also called vocal chords) near the middle of your throat. The vocal chords which drive this pipe (in white at right) oscillate a bit like strings that are fixed at each end. During puberty, the male vocal chords become longer and thicker. How would you expect this to affect the pitch of the male voice? Explain briefly, using equations as appropriate. Resonant modes of the Earth. The seismic waves released in large earthquakes such as the 2004 Sumatra earthquake excite standing wave modes in the Earth. What are the frequencies of these standing wave modes? Lets model the Earth as a cube whose side length is equal to the Earths diameter, and consider standing waves that exist between opposite faces of the cube. Of the two kinds of seismic waves (S and P), only the P-waves (which are longitudinal waves) will penetrate the Earths core. Their wave speed as a function of depth is shown at right. Estimate the average Pwave speed from this plot, and then estimate the frequency of the fundamental standing wave mode. Could you hear the Earth ringing after a
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major seismic event? 7. Pipe organs. The lowest note on large pipe organs is C0, which has a frequency of 16.35 Hz, and the highest note is C9, which has a frequency of 8371 Hz. (a) For a pipe closed at one end, what must be the pipe lengths to play these two frequencies? If it is open at both ends? (b) In the commonly used equal tempered chromatic scale, the organ is tuned so that there are 12 notes per octave (e.g., between C0 and C1, and between C1 and C2 . . .) and 1/12 times larger than the each successive note on the keyboard has a frequency that is 2 preceding note. Plot (e.g., using a spreadsheet program) the frequency of each note versus the note number between C0 and C9 on (i) a linear frequency scale and (ii) with a logarithmic frequency scale. Number the notes 1, 2, 3 ... starting with C0. (c) If the pipes in an organ were separated from each other by a constant distance, what mathematical form would you expect the tops of the pipes for successive notes to trace out? (Take a look at the organ in Sage Chapel for a clue.) (d) Notes that are separated by successive octaves (e.g., C0, C1, C2 . . .) sound to us to be equally spaced in pitch. From your answer to (b), what does this tell you about the relationship between (perceived) pitch and frequency? 8. Boundary conditions. At t = 0, the wave pulses shown below are moving away from one another. The wave speed is 5 m/s. The left end (x = 0) is free (massless slip-ring boundary condition) and the right end (x = 25 m) is fixed.
5 4
y (cm)

3 2 1 0

Free End

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
x (m)

(a) Draw the left end of the string (0 x 4 m) at t = 1.2 s. (b) Draw the right end of the string (21 m x 25 m) at t = 2.0 s. (c) Draw the velocity distribution (a graph of y / t as a function of x) at t = 4.2 s for the part of the string where the velocity is nonzero. 9. Wave transmission across a boundary. String 1 with wave speed v1 is connected to string 2 with wave speed v2. A square pulse of width W is incident from string 1 onto the boundary between strings.

(a) Sketch the reflection coefficient R and transmission coefficient T for this pulse as a function of the ratio v2/v1. Label important magnitudes.

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(b) Can the transmitted wave amplitude be larger than the incident amplitude? If so, when, and why? (c) Can the reflected wave amplitude be larger than the incident amplitude? If so, when and why? (d) You notice that the transmitted pulse appears to be roughly half as wide as the incident pulse. Will the reflected pulse have the same sign or be inverted relative to the incident pulse? (e) Is wave reflection symmetric? How does the reflection coefficient for waves incident upon string 2 from string 1 compare with that for waves incident from string 1 from string 2, for the general case v1 v2? Express your answer as a ratio. 10. Standing Wave Ratio. Suppose that you launch a harmonic wave yi = A cos (kx + t) on a long string from x>>0 toward an end at x=0, where it is reflected with reflection coefficient R in the range 1 R 1. The resulting displacement of the string due to the incident and reflected waves is given by y(x,t) = A cos (kx + t) + RA cos (kx t) (a) What value of R would correspond to an ideal free end at x=0? (b) Show that y(x,t) can be rewritten as the sum of two standing waves y(x,t) = B sin kx sin t + C cos kx cos t Find the values of B and C in terms of A and R. (Use the trig identity for cos(a+b)=?) (c) The ratio of the larger of the standing wave amplitudes to the smaller (i.e., B/C if B>C) is called the standing wave ratio (SWR). Show that SWR =
1+ | R | 1 | R |

[For |R| 1, there are no ideal nodes (points of zero amplitude). Instead, the amplitude of the SHM that occurs at each point oscillates with x from a maximum value to a nonzero minimum. The SWR is the ratio of the maximum to the minimum amplitude versus x. For a reflection coefficient |R|=1, there are ideal nodes and the SWR is infinite; for a reflection coefficient R=0, there is no standing wave and SWR=0.]

Questions, Exercises and Problems from Y&F 12th Ed. for study and review: (Do not turn these in!) Volume 1, Chapter 15: Questions 12, 15, 19, 21, 22 Exercises 12, 16, 18, 25, 28, 32, 34, 35, 39, 41, 42, 45, 46 Problems 53, 57, 68, 69, 70 71, 76, 80, 85 Volume 1, Chapter 16: Questions 1, 2 Exercises 1, 2, 3, 6, 13, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28 Problems 54, 59, 60, 61, 66

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