Thread: Deriving Centripetal Acceleration?

ok i have no idea how to do this, can you guys please help me out with this for physics?

"For no apparent reason, a poodle is running counter-clockwise at a constant speed of 3.90 m/s in a circle with radius 2.3 m. Let v_1 be the velocity vector at time t_1, and let v_2 be the velocity vector at time t_2. Recall that average acceleration = delta_v/delta_t."

i really need help on finding the magnitude and direction of the average acceleration at a given delta_t, for example, delta_t=0.5

i've used the formulas v_x=-w sin wt and v_y = w cos wt, but i'm not sure if that's right. anyways, thanks in advance to anyone who helps

cool, thanks for adding fancy versions of the equations, but that doesn't really answer my question, which was for the magnitude and direction...

The magnitude of a two-dimensional vector is given by

in which is the x-component of the vector and is the y-component. This is an application of Pythagoras theorem.

As for the direction, that depends on which coordinate system you want to use to express the direction. A possibility is to express the direction as angle . Let's measure as the angle between x-direction and the vector, being positive in counter-clockwise direction (this is a common convention). The angle is then given by:

okay, thank you, this might help a lot!