Physics for Engineers: Momentum Conservation and Collisions (2015 March 12th)
Channel: akarshnarasimhan
Date: 2015-03-26

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This is an "evening lecture" delivered to an Engineering Physics - I class on momentum conservation and collisions, delivered by me as a graduate Physics TA. As these represent some of my first forays into teaching, I would greatly appreciate any comments and feedback.

Please watch out for some somewhat inaccurate statements about the "energy in the relative motion" being dissipated. While the general idea is correct, I was not fully clear on the specifics while lecturing. In an inelastic collision, while you can boost into the reference frame in which one of the objects is at rest, the process of the collision accelerates the object till the two objects attain the same velocity. So in some sense, the correct analysis for energy dissipation must be done in the frame moving with the final velocity of the two objects ("center of momentum frame"). In this frame, all the kinetic energy is dissipated away.

Topics covered:
Momentum
Impulse-Momentum Theorem
Momentum conservation
Elastic and Inelastic collisions