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The ancient Greek understanding of physics was limited to the statics of simple machines (the balance of forces), and did not include dynamics or the concept of work. During the Renaissance the dynamics of the Mechanical Powers, as the simple machines were called, began to be studied from the standpoint of how far they could lift a load, in addition to the force they could apply, leading ...
Work done by force fields can be done indefinitely slowly, so as to approach the fictive reversible quasi-static ideal, in which entropy is not created in the system by the process. In thermodynamics, non-mechanical work is to be contrasted with mechanical work that is done by forces in immediate contact between the system and its surroundings.
Work is dependent on the displacement as well as the force acting on an object. As a particle moves through a force field along a path C, the work done by the force is a line integral: = This value is independent of the velocity /momentum that the particle travels along the path.
Power is the rate with respect to time at which work is done; it is the time derivative of work: =, where P is power, W is work, and t is time. We will now show that the mechanical power generated by a force F on a body moving at the velocity v can be expressed as the product: P = d W d t = F ⋅ v {\displaystyle P={\frac {dW}{dt}}=\mathbf {F ...
The work done by the force F is given by the integral = = = = = , where dr is the differential element along the curve that is the trajectory of P, and v is its velocity. It is important to notice that the value of the work W depends on the trajectory r ( t ) .
For example, if a person places a force of 10 N at the terminal end of a wrench that is 0.5 m long (or a force of 10 N acting 0.5 m from the twist point of a wrench of any length), the torque will be 5 N⋅m – assuming that the person moves the wrench by applying force in the plane of movement and perpendicular to the wrench.
The work per unit of charge is defined by moving a negligible test charge between two points, and is expressed as the difference in electric potential at those points. The work can be done, for example, by electrochemical devices (electrochemical cells) or different metals junctions [clarification needed] generating an electromotive force.
Work done by conservative forces does not depend on the path followed by the object, but only the end points, as the above equation shows. The gradient theorem also has an interesting converse: any path-independent vector field can be expressed as the gradient of a scalar field .