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Oscillation frequency

  1. Dec 8, 2007 #1
    A winch cable has a cross sectional area of 1.5 cm^2 and a length of 2.5 m. Young's modulus for the cable is 150 GN/m^2. A 950-kg engine block is hung from the end of the cable.
    (a) By what length does the cable stretch?
    (b) If we treat the cable as a piece of string, what is the oscillation frequency of the engine block at the end of the cable?

    2. Relevant equations

    3. The attempt at a solution
    For (a) I used Young's modulus and found that the cable stretches 0.104 cm.
    For (b) I don't know how to go about finding the frequency.
  2. jcsd
  3. Dec 8, 2007 #2
    Think of the cable as a spring and the engine as a mass on the end of a spring. When the cable stretches it will stretch past its equilibrium point and then compress back up, then stretch back down...etc. Given that the cable is behaving like a spring, how can you relate Young's modulus to the spring constant (usually k)?

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