Examples
Various examples of mechanical resonance include:
- musical instruments (acoustic resonance).
- Most clocks keep time by mechanical resonance in a balance wheel, pendulum, or quartz crystal.
- tidal resonance of the Bay of Fundy.
- Orbital resonance as in some moons of the solar system's gas giants.
- The resonance of the basilar membrane in the ear.
- Making a child's swing swing higher by pushing it at each swing.
- A wineglass breaking when someone sings a loud note at exactly the right pitch.
Resonance may cause violent swaying motions in improperly constructed structures, such as bridges and buildings. The London Millennium Footbridge (nicknamed the Wobbly Bridge) exhibited this problem. A faulty bridge can even be destroyed by its resonance (see "Angers Bridge"; that is why soldiers are trained not to march in lockstep across a bridge, although it is suspected to be a myth, see e.g., MythBusters' 'Breakstep Bridge'. Mechanical systems store potential energy in different forms. For example, a spring/mass system stores energy as tension in the spring, which is ultimately stored as the energy of bonds between atoms.
Read more about this topic: Mechanical Resonance
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