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An osculating circle is a circle that best approximates the curvature of a curve at a specific point. It is tangent to the curve at that point and has the same curvature as the curve at that point. [2] The osculating circle provides a way to understand the local behavior of a curve and is commonly used in differential geometry and calculus.
The cam can be seen as a device that converts rotational motion to reciprocating (or sometimes oscillating) motion. [clarification needed] [3] A common example is the camshaft of an automobile, which takes the rotary motion of the engine and converts it into the reciprocating motion necessary to operate the intake and exhaust valves of the cylinders.
In mechanics and physics, simple harmonic motion (sometimes abbreviated as SHM) is a special type of periodic motion an object experiences by means of a restoring force whose magnitude is directly proportional to the distance of the object from an equilibrium position and acts towards the equilibrium position.
The animation shows the circuit at progressive points in the oscillation. The oscillations are slowed down; in an actual tuned circuit the charge may oscillate back and forth thousands to billions of times per second. An LC circuit, oscillating at its natural resonant frequency, can store electrical energy. See the animation.
Animation of a standing wave (red) created by the superposition of a left traveling (blue) and right traveling (green) wave. In physics, a standing wave, also known as a stationary wave, is a wave that oscillates in time but whose peak amplitude profile does not move in space.
In addition, an oscillating system may be subject to some external force, as when an AC circuit is connected to an outside power source. In this case the oscillation is said to be driven . The simplest example of this is a spring-mass system with a sinusoidal driving force.
The displacement of an undamped spring-mass system oscillating around the equilibrium over time is a sine wave. Sinusoids that exist in both position and time also have: a spatial variable x {\displaystyle x} that represents the position on the dimension on which the wave propagates.
Mathematically, the simplest kind of transverse wave is a plane linearly polarized sinusoidal one. "Plane" here means that the direction of propagation is unchanging and the same over the whole medium; "linearly polarized" means that the direction of displacement too is unchanging and the same over the whole medium; and the magnitude of the displacement is a sinusoidal function only of time ...