STANDING WAVES

There are two types of waves, they are Traveling Waves and Standing
Waves.

Traveling wave is a wave where the maxima and minimal move

continuously through the material they are in. So if you look at any point In the
material of the wave, that one point is going to be oscillated completely by the
wave as the waves moves through it. There is no part of the material that
doesn’t oscillate as the wave moves through it, and the wave moves
continuously through the material

This is different with standing wave. Standing wave is a wave where the
maxima and minima “stand Still” in place and do not move. The wave oscillates
by flattening out and then achieving the maxima and minima again. So you can
see in the animation how different its from traveling wave. Its maxima and
minima oscillate up and down, but there are also certain poin on the wave that
actually do not oscillate at all. They just still in place.

Standing waves are actually the result of the superposition of two

traveling waves with the same wavelength and frequency moving through each
other. As their amplitudes add together, they produce a standing wave. But for
standing wave, its only formed when the medium is vibrated at specific
frequencies. These frequencies are known as harmonic frequencies, or
merely harmonics. At any frequency other than a harmonic frequency, the
interference of reflected and incident waves leads to a resulting disturbance of
the medium that is irregular and non-repeating

If waves strike a barrier of any kind, the waves are reflected back. The
incident wave is the wave that first strikes the surface. The wave bouncing back
is the reflected wave. The reflected wave has the same frequency as the incident
wave, but is moving in the opposite direction and interferes with the incident
wave. When a wave hits a solid wall, the reflected wave will bounce back 180
degrees out of phase with the incident wave, and they'll cancel each other out

In this example, you can see that the blue wave as the incident wave and
red traveling waves as reflected waves are moving through each other and
adding to produce the black standing wave oscillating up and down., this is the
standing wave. The point is a standing wave is really just the superposition of
two traveling waves moving through each other like this.

A standing wave is called as such because, unlike ‘regular’ waves, it does

not look like it’s traveling from one side to the other. Rather, it looks as if it
were waving while standing in place. Every standing wave pattern has certain
points along the medium that appear to be standing still. These points are called
nodes, or ‘points of no displacement’. There are also certain points along the
medium that undergo maximum displacement during each vibrational cycle of
the standing wave. These points are called antinodes.

Let see this animation, You can see in the animation that there are some
points in the wave that are not moving at all, that is nodes and then there are
points halfway between two adjacent nodes where the motion of the string has
the greatest deviation we say it antinodes.

The frequency is the number of these repetitions completed every second.

This is another really central fact about a standing wave, it has the same
wavelength and frequency as the two traveling waves that make it up. So if you
observe how many complete traveling waves pass by a certain point in 1
second, that's exactly equal to how many oscillations the standing wave makes
in one second. So the period and frequency of the two traveling waves are equal
to the period and frequency of the standing wave. If I count the total period for
the standing wave, the time it takes to oscillate from the top to the bottom and
back

Because a standing wave has both a wavelength and frequency, we can

also talk about it having a velocity in quotes, because the velocity of a wave is
equal to wavelength times frequency. And when we talk about the velocity of a
standing wave we really mean the velocity of the traveling waves that make the
standing wave up. We can use these interchangeably because the traveling
waves have the same wavelength and frequency as the standing wave. So
because the standing wave is standing, obviously it's not actually moving at say
3 meters per second, but it can still have a velocity because when we talk about
velocity we can really be referring to the travelling waves that make it up.

Example of standing wave in our daily life is music instrument like

guitar. You know that the guitar string (that you plucked) is restricted on both
ends – by the bridge on one side and by your finger on the fretboard on the
other. The moment you pluck a string, the wave reflects off each of the
aforementioned boundaries of the string. The energy of the wave spreads out as
it keeps moving back and forth between the two ends. Due to the process of
interference, standing waves are produced.

A guitar string supports different modes of vibration for stationary waves.

The first harmonic is the mode of vibration with the longest wavelength
In the first harmonic on a string, there is two nodes and one antinode. For a
guitar string of length l, the length of a complete wavelength of the lowest
harmonic is 2l because there is only one loop of the stationary wave, which is
half a wavelength