Conservation of Mechanical Energy
Conservation of
momentum is generally simple and straightforward - after all,
there is only one kind of (linear) momentum (mv), and if no external
forces act on a system, it is conserved. Momentum after equals
momentum before - easy! Conservation of energy, on the other hand can
get very complicated - there are many forms of energy,
and accounting for all of them can be very taxing.
We are going to keep things as simple as possible by restricting
our attention to mechanical energy - and in particular,
we will consider only three types of energy:
last update November 21, 2007 by JL Stanbrough