WORK

PREPARED BY: SIR AJ

OBJECTIVES

• Discuss what it means for a force to do work on a body

• Identify the steps on how to calculate the amount of work done
• Calculate the amount of work done
• Work – any activity that requires muscular or mental effort.
• In Physics, you do work by exerting a force on a body while
that body moves from one place to another – that is, undergoes
displacement.
• You do more work if the force is greater of if the displacement
is greater.
• Mathematically, we can define work as

Where:
W is the work done on a body
F is the constant applied Force (vector)
d is the displacement (vector)
• The SI unit of work is the joule (abbreviated J, pronounced
“jool”, and named in the honor of 19th-century English
physicist James Prescott Joule). From the equation we can see
that 1 J is equivalent to 1 newton-meter (N*m)
If you exert a force at an angle with respect to the displacement,
we use the equation:

If so that F and d are in the same direction, the and we are back
to
 has the form of the scalar product of two vectors Hence, we
can write the equation as Work is a scalar quantity.
If we are to graph Force versus distance, we can say that Work
done is equal to the area under Force-distance graph.
EXAMPLE

(a) Steve exerts a steady force of magnitude 210 N on a stalled car as he

pushes it a distance of 18 m. The car also has a flat tire, so to make the car
track straight Steve must push at an angle of 30° to the direction of motion.
How much work does Steve do?
(b) In a helpful mood, Steve pushes a second stalled car with a steady force
F = (160 N )i – (40 N) j. The displacement of the car is d = (14 m) i + (11
m) j. How much work does Steve do in this case?
SOLUTION

• First, identify the given

Evaluate.
a.
a.

b.
b.

RTF: W
NOTE:

• A constant force can do positive, negative or zero work depending on the angle
between the force and the displacement.
• If the Force has a component in the direction of displacement: Work is positive.
• If the Force has a component opposite to the direction of displacement: Work is
negative.
• If the Force (or force component) is perpendicular to the direction of
displacement: the Force (or force component) does no work on the object.
NOTE:

Keep track of who’s doing the work. We always speak of work done on a particular
body by a specific force. Always be sure to specify exactly what force is doing the
work you are talking about.
e.g.,
When you lift a book, you exert an upward force on the book and the book’s
displacement is upward, the work done by the lifting force on the book is positive. But
the work done by the gravitational force (weight) on a book being lifted is negative
because the downward gravitational force is opposite to the upward displacement.
TOTAL WORK

Steps in calculating work when several forces acts on a body:

First: Compute the work done by each separate force.
Second: Take the algebraic sum of the quantities of work done by the individual
forces to calculate for the total work .

Another way to find the total work is to compute the vector sum of the forces and
then use this vector sum as in or
EXAMPLE: WORK DONE BY SEVERAL FORCE

A farmer hitches her tractor to a sled loaded with firewood and

pulls it a distance of 20 m along level ground. The total weight of
sled and load is 14,700 N. The tractor exerts a constant 5000 N
force at an angle of 36.9° above the horizontal. A 3500 N friction
force opposes the sled’s motion. Find the work done by each
force acting on the sled and the total work done by all the forces.
 SOLUTION

Given: RTF:

a. Work done by each force:

b. Total work done