1.

Characteristics of mechanical waves

1. There are only two fundamental mechanisms for transporting energy: a streaming of particles and a
flowing of waves. A wave is a physical phenomenon that transfers energy without transferring
matter.
2. In general a wave is a moving self sustained disturbance of a medium, and
that medium can be either a field (gravitational, electric) or a substance (a
solid, a fluid). Waves in material media are known as mechanical waves
3. Each material medium is a continuous collection of atoms with elastic
properties. If the atoms are pushed together, they repel and if séparated they
attract. The force between two neighbouring atoms is a restoring force and
atoms behave like springs.
4. Imagine that energy is imparted to some atoms, as it happens when a bell is
struck with a hammer. These atoms are forced off their equilibrium positions, thereby interacting
more strongly with néighboring atoms, doing work on them and displacing them.
5. These newly shifted atoms interact with still others and the displacement process continues with
energy transferred from one atom to another: the state of being displaced moves through the
medium as a wave.
6. There is a great variety of mechanical waves, among which; waves on strings, surface waves on
liquids, sound waves in the air, seismic waves and generally speaking compression waves on solids
and fluids. In all cases the displacement advances, not the material medium.


v
2. Longitudinal and transverse waves
1. There are two basic forms of waves: longitudinal and tranverse waves. If perturbation
the sustaining medium is displaced parallel to the direction of propagation
the wave is longitudinal. Sound, and compression waves (among which
certain seismic waves called P-waves) are longitudinal waves. We can
create a longitudinal wave on a slinky compressing several of its coils and
releasing them all at once: the disturbance will rapidly advance along the
length of the spring.
2. When the sustaining medium is displaced perpendicular to the direction of propagation, the wave is
transverse. We can produce a transverse wave on a slinky displacing its end up and down and
producing a bump that moves as a pulse of energy along the length of the string. Examples of
transverse waves are plucked guitar strings and certain seismic waves
called S-waves (S stands for shear). Fluid medium cannot support
transverse wave (they can’t resist to shear): it is from the fact that seismic
S-wave do not travel through the core but they are reflected that we
know the Earth has a liquid core (the deepest we can drill is a few
kilometres and the core starts 2900 Km under the surface)

3. Waveforms
1. We start our study with waves in ropes since they provide a simple visual

model. A hand holding the end of a taut rope and goes up and down just v
once generates a transverse wavepulse. Observations show that the shape of
the pulse (the profile) is detèrmined by the motion of the hand, while the
speed of the pulse is determined by the tension and inertia of the rope.
2. If the hand oscillates up and down in a regular way it can generate a
wavetrain, a single repeated profile wave. However long a real wavetrain 
v

1
 is, it is finite: there was a time before it was generated and there will be a time when it ends. A burst
or a whistle are acoustical wavetrains. Anyway it is mathematically simpler to assume that
wavetrains are infinitely long: these idealized disturbance composed of countless repetitions are
said to be periodic.

4. To find the speed of Waves  Crest

1. The time for a single cycle to occur, which corresponds to the number of
seconds per cycle, is called the period T of the wave. It can be seen as the
time it takes for a single profile to pass a point in space: T=elapsed
time/number of cycles (remember that a fraction should be read as “how
much of the numerator is associated with one unit of the denominator”) Throat
2. The inverse of the period I called the frequency f=number of cycles/elapsed time, f=1/T: if you read
the fraction you get how many cycles are associated with one second, ie the number of cycles per second
3. The length of one single profile is called the wavelength 
4. If you are at rest and a wavetrain on a string is progressing past you, since a wavelength  passes
in a time T, its speed must equal  /T and since f=1/T we have an expression for the speed of any
periodic wave: v=f 
y

+A

Asin 

0 x

-A

5. Harmonic waves
1. The fundamental waveform is the one we get when the hand that holds the rope oscillates up and
down following a harmonic motion (HM). HM is the kind of motion we get when we have a point-
like particle describing uniform rotational motion and we project its positions onto y-axis (or onto x-
axis) . If the hand oscillates exactly in the way the shadow does we get a HM and the resulting wave
along the length of the rope is a harmonic wave. Harmonic waves are fundamental because real
waves can be seen as the result of overlapping harmonic waves


2. In uniform rotational motion the particle is moving in a circle with constant linear speed v
therefore it spans a given amount of radians  always in the same time, so that it has constant
2
angular speed  (which is the number of radians it spans in one second   ). Let A be the
T
radius of the circle, the particle’s shadow position along the y-axis is given by:
2
y 0 (t )  A sin   A sin t  A sin t .
T
The radius A is called the amplitude and the wave builds up and falls off between values of +A and –
A in the y-direction. The energy associated with the wave is proportional to the amplitude squared:

2
 for sound it represents how loud it is). Every point on the rope replicates the oscillation of the hand
after a delay. If you look a fixed point on the rope you see it oscillating up and down in a harmonic
way exactly as the hand did before.
The disturbance y(t )  A sin  travels along the x-axis and reaches the point x after a delay t . Let
v be the wave’s speed, we have for this delay:

x
vt  x  t 
v

At any given time t , the point at x has the height y that the point x  0 had t seconds before.
This can be written as:
2
y(t )  y 0 (t  t )  y(t )  A sin
T
t  t  .
y
x 2  x
Since t  we get y(t )  y 0 sin t  
v T 
 v
+A
and then, inserting vT   we eventually arrive
at the equation for a harmonic wave:
x
 2 2  1
  3 2
y(x , t )  A sin  t 

x  2 2
 T  
-A
In this equation, if you fix the time is like taking a
photo of the wave’s profile at t , if you fix the
space you can get the high of the rope at any position x along its length. The argument of the sine is
called the phase.

6. Transverse waves on strings

Speed
1. We are now finding out what determines the speed of a wave on a string: for our purposes it will
suffice to just state the result. The central concerns to find the speed of a wave on a string are:
 how much mass is being accelerated
 with how much force does the medium resist deformation
2. The total mass of the string is irrelevant since the motion at any moment is occurring in a portion of
it, but the more massive a portion of the string is, the more difficult it is to accelerate. The important
physical quantity here is the mass per unit length m / L .
3. Consider a pulse travelling along a string (it might be the string of a guitar, violin or piano). There is

a constant tension FT providing the force that pulls the string back to its equilibrium position. The
greater the tension, the greater the acceleration, the faster the return, the faster the wave can travel.
FT
4. The result is v  : when m / L is large there is a lot of inertia and the speed is low, when FT
m /L
is large the string tends to spring back rapidly and the speed is high.
5. A remarkable example of this formula is the whip, which becomes thinner and thinner towards the
tip, namely m / L decreases. This results in increasing the speed of a pulse as it proceeds across the

3
 whip’s length. When a whip handle is rapidly moved, the tip of the whip can exceed the speed of
sound in air (340 m/s) producing a small sonic boom described as a "crack". Whips were the first
man-made implements to break the sound barrier.

Reflection, Absorption and Transmission

1. When the medium in which waves travel changes, three physical phenomena happen: reflection,
absorption and transmission.
2. Reflection: When the rope has a fixed end, as a pulse arrives
it exerts a vertical force on the anchor point, which in turn
exerts an equal and opposite force on the string. This
downward force on the rope generates un upside-down
reflected pulse travelling in the opposite direction. Because
it is inverted it is said to be 180 degrees out-of phase with
the incident wave. When the end point is free, that rope’s
segment rises until all the energy is stored elastically and
pulls upward on the rope generating a reflected wavepulse
with the same side up as before, travelling back, and said to
be in phase with the incident wave.
3. Absorption: is the phenomenon that occurs when we
remove (draw off) energy from the rope by means of
friction. Since friction is speed-dependent, when a wave
passes from a medium to another with different characteristics,
speed changes and friction changes as well, an then there will
be a redistribution of energy
4. Transmission: Consider a wave that is changing the medium,
namely passing into a rope with greater (or lower) mass-to-
length ratio. This large inertia acts at the junction point as the
fixed end we saw before, exerting a downward reaction force
that causes the reflected wave to be phase-shifted by 180°. The
second medium is also displaced and a portion of the incident
energy appears as a transmitted wave in phase with the
incident one. When the first medium is denser than the second
the situation resembles the one with a free end point and we have no phase shift in both reflected
and transmitted wave.
5. The larger the density of the transmitting medium, the smaller the length of the wave. Indeed both waves
share the common source at the junction point, so
the time it takes to generate them is the same, and
this is also the time it takes for the pulse to pass a
point on the rope. Given that the speed is slower
on the heavy side of the rope, the wavepulse on
this side should have a smaller length to pass a
point in space in the same time it does on the
other side. We conclude that when a wave changes
medium it has the same frequency and a different
wavelength.

To quickly recap:
f is determined by the source and characterizes the wave, independently of the medium
v is a property of the medium and is not determined by the source
 is determined by both f , 