Centrifugal force

Riders on a swing carousel interpret the cessation of upward motion as a balancing of the force of gravity, the force of the tension of the chains, and a centrifugal force pushing them away from the center of rotation. A stationary observer on the ground observes uniform circular motion, which requires a net centripetal force that is the combination of the force of gravity and the force of the tension of the chains.

Centrifugal force is a fictitious force in Newtonian mechanics (also called an "inertial" or "pseudo" force) that appears to act on all objects when viewed in a rotating frame of reference. It appears to be directed radially away from the axis of rotation of the frame. The magnitude of the centrifugal force F on an object of mass m at the distance r from the axis of a rotating frame of reference with angular velocity ω is:

This fictitious force is often applied to rotating devices, such as centrifuges, centrifugal pumps, centrifugal governors, and centrifugal clutches, and in centrifugal railways, planetary orbits and banked curves, when they are analyzed in a non–inertial reference frame such as a rotating coordinate system.

The term has sometimes also been used for the reactive centrifugal force, a real frame-independent Newtonian force that exists as a reaction to a centripetal force in some scenarios.


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