Instantaneous velocity

Examples to explain instantaneous vs average velocity

 Say you knew you knew how long it took you to drive to school each day and how far the
distance was.
o Say the distance of road you travel to get to school is 10 km and it takes you 20
minutes to drive to school
o You could calculate your ‘velocity’ by dividing the distance by the amount of time it
took you to get there
o You would calculate your velocity to be 30 km/h
o This velocity is what we would call 30 km/h, because it is the average of the distance
travelled over the total time taken. It is not the best representation of the speed you
were ACTUALLY travelling, because it is very likely that you were not travelling at a
constant 30 km/h throughout that entire 20-minute journey

 Say you wanted to see how the speed you travelled across the journey to school changed
o Here, you would be trying to measure your instantaneous velocity over the journey
o Say we had three measurements – one where we measured the average distance
travelled over each minute, every 5 minutes and every 10 minutes, and compared it
to our overall ‘average’ velocity that we found above
o Then we calculate the ‘average’ velocity over each time interval and record it
o We can then plot the ‘average’ speeds to visualise how fast the car is travelling
o I created some sample data and got a plot that looks like this:

Velocity over journey

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Minute class 5 minute class

10 minute class 20 minute class

 You can see that the 20 minute class is a straight line – it seems to say that the velocity is
constant
 The 10 minute class is broken up into sections, with the second section being higher than the
first section
 The 5 minute class is broken up into 4 sections – you can’t see the first two but the last two
you can see quite distinctly, showing the speed changing
  The minute class shows that the speed varies between cruising at 60 and then stopping to 0
and then accelerating again to a speed of 60
 We can see that as we decrease the time interval, we get a more accurate picture of the
velocity the car is travelling at a particular instant, with the minute class giving us a clear
breakdown of how fast the car is travelling
 The concept of instantaneous velocity is that it is the velocity when we take the time interval
to be very close to 0 → this will give us the most accurate velocity that the car is travelling at
a particular point in time.

This concept of finding the ‘average’ of an interval that is very close to 0 is the whole concept
underpinning calculus.

 By finding the average over an interval very close to 0, you can find how fast something is
changing at a particular instant
 It’s hard to explain why this would be useful, but it can be used to accurately find when
something is changing the fastest, slowest, or when something is not changing at all
 We can also get a picture of when things are increasing or decreasing generally. Say we want
to look at a car and know exactly when it is speeding up and slowing down, so we can
calibrate some hybrid electricity technology to optimise energy usage, these kinds of
calculations would allow us to do this.

One final note on ‘instantaneous velocity’. We can visualise the instantaneous velocity as the
gradient of the tangent to the curve.

Say we had a couple points plotted above representing the average speed at given time intervals.
And then we used some technique to fit a curve to those points, obtaining the red curve as shown.
 We could calculate the instantaneous velocity by finding a line such that it is tangent to the
curve at the point
 Shown below
  The gradient of the line is the ‘instantaneous’ velocity at that given point
o More broadly, we say that this is the ‘derivative’, if we are talking outside of a
distance-time context
 The key question is – why is the gradient of the tangent equal to the instantaneous velocity?
o Remember that I said that we can find the instantaneous velocity by finding the
average of an interval with size very close to 0:

 To find the average, we find the distance – which is the difference in y-coordinates, and we
divide this by the time – which is the difference in x-coordinates
o But y/x is really the gradient, so by finding the velocity, we are finding the gradient
of the curve
o If we reduce the time difference to close to 0, we are making dx very close to 0.
When we do this, we are comparing a point in time to a point in the next in the
instant
o We can visualise this as drawing a tangent to the curve at the point in time we want
to find, and the gradient of this tangent line would be the instantaneous velocity -
because the two points are pretty much on top of each other

Let me know if you have any questions about this, we can chat about it more in a future lesson if you
are interested.