Probing the Force Field to Identify Potential Energy

A small ball resting on a curve in a gravitational field offers a simple and compelling example of potential energy. The force required to move the ball, or to maintain it in a given position on a slope, is the negative of the vector gradient of the potential field: the steeper the curve, the greater the force required to push the ball up the hill (or keep it from rolling down). We thus observe the turning points (horizontal tangency) of the potential energy shape as positions of equilibrium (in which case the “restoring force” drops to zero). In this paper, we appeal directly to this type of system using both one- and two-dimensional shapes: curves and surfaces. The shapes are produced to a desired mathematical form generally using additive manufacturing, and we use a combination of load cells to measure the forces acting on a small steel ball-bearing subject to gravity. The measured forces, as a function of location, are then subject to integration to recover the potential energy function. The utility of this approach, in addition to pedagogical clarity, concerns extension and applications to more complex systems in which the potential energy would not be typically known a priori, for example, in nonlinear structural mechanics in which the potential energy changes under the influence of a control parameter, but there is the possibility of force probing the configuration space. A brief example of applying this approach to a simple elastic structure is presented.