Acceleration formula. What does 32 feet per second per second actually mean?

Question

I used to be a member of the Red devils Parachute Team. I know that on leaving the A/craft, I accelerated to approx 120 mph in 10 seconds. Every 1000 feet after that takes 5 seconds to fall. After falling 1000 ft (initially in 10 seconds), I reached my terminal velocity of approx 120 mph. Im curious about the formula.
Cheers

Answer 1

It means that for every 1 second that you fall you increase your velocity by the amount equal to the pull of gravity. So in the first second you travel at an average of 32 feet per second. The second second you travel you travel at an average of 64 feet per second and so on. The fastest that you can go is 120mph as the air resistance keeps you from accelerating any more. In a vacuum therefore you would continue the rate of acceleration until you hit the ground. OUCH. Also why in a vacuum a feather would also fall at the rate of 32 ft per second per second. This is usually written as 32 ft/second squared.
That dragged me back a few years. Happy Christmas.

Answer 2

I would probably stick to those figure without using a formula, empirical evidence is always better (the real world).

However as an Engineer, I can tell you that everything falls at 9.81 m/s/s.
Most people use 10 metres per second per second.
9.81 is a figure from Newton. One Newton (N) is 9.81 Kilogrammes (Kg) incidentally (but try to forget that for now).

Effectively we are measuring acceleration.
Assuming no air friction.
In the first second everthing dropped, travels 9.81 metres.
Yet it accelerates at a rate of 9.81 m/s.
It travels 9.81m further for every second it drops.
So by the tenth second we are travelling at a speed of 9.81m x 10s = 98.1m/s. And have covered a distance of 9.81m x 10s x 10s = 981m.
With no drag we would continue to accelerate.
However there is always air friction, and this will affect every shape differently.
We must therefore calculate a 'drag co-efficient' for the shape that is falling. This calculation is long and involved. You can look it up but I won't bore you any more than I have.
Finally, (don't yawn) you need to draw a graph with your acceleration and your drag co-efficient. Where the lines meet will give you a speed which is your terminal velocity.
This is the speed at which you stop accelerating
Every shape has a different terminal velocity. Go into a head first dive and you can forget about the figures your instructor has given you. I can only hope the figure skydivers use, take this into account.
The graph will also show you where and when terminal velocity is reached.
Once you know your drag co-efficient you can put it into a formula with your newtonian acceleration, and work out your actual acceleration up to terminal velocity.

Oh and by the way you could have picked something easier, even engineers write programs so they don't have to work this stuff out. You might be able to find a free program if you search it.

Answer 3

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RE:
Acceleration formula. What does 32 feet per second per second actually mean?
I used to be a member of the Red devils Parachute Team. I know that on leaving the A/craft, I accelerated to approx 120 mph in 10 seconds. Every 1000 feet after that takes 5 seconds to fall. After falling 1000 ft (initially in 10 seconds), I reached my terminal velocity of approx 120 mph. Im...

Answer 4

32 Feet Per Second

Answer 5

Gosh, some people can't help being over-complex. The energy relationship between mass and velocity is simple. If I put a 1 Kg weight on your foot, it won't hurt. If I drop it from 2m, it will hurt somewhat. If I drop it from 200m it could crush your foot. So, obviously the energy in a body must consist of its mass and velocity. Then very simply, as you up the velocity, the energy goes up by the square - a top baseball pitcher only thows about 5 times faster than a child, but his ball will hit you with 25 times the force. E=mc^2 is simply an extension of the kinetic energy formula e=mv^2 that you learn in high school physics. The difference is that in the nuclear formula you are considering a total conversion of mass to energy, where the result is electro-magnetic radiation travelling at light speed. Recall that light-speed is really the wrong term, as light is simply a small fraction of the electromagetic spectrum, which includes radio waves all the way up to x-rays.

Answer 6

Don't over engineer the obvious. Although you COULD do the computations for " how far would I have gone by "X", how fast would I be going by "X", I think the real answer you're looking for is a much simpler explanation. Just keep moving the decimal place!.

1 second, final velocity 32 ft / per sec. ( 21.8 MPH )
end of second second 64 ft per second ( aprox 43.6 MPH)
end of 3rd second 65.4 MPH.

Or,

in a hundredth of a second .32 F/sec
in ten seconds 320 F/sec (218 MPH)
in 100 seconds 3,200 f / sec (2,181 MPH)
in 1000 seconds ( 16 minutes ) 32,000 f/sec (21,800 MPH)
in 10,000 seconds ( 2 hours, 46 minutes ) 218,000 MPH
in 100,000 seconds ( 27 hours )
in 1,000,000 seconds (11.5 days) 2,180,000 MPH,

But we're still not moving that fast. Light is measures in "per second"... as in the speed of light is 186,000 Miles per second .. times 60 seconds in a minute times 60 minutes in an hour.

670,616,629 M.PH.
So, as you can see, 1 "gee" , after a week and a half, has got you up to less than a third of a percent of light speed. That puts it in perspective as far as a cosmic setting is concerned.

What does 1 G feel like? a sports car with sticky tyres on hot dry pavement will corner at about 1 g. that means that you are being accelerated away from going straight ahead at 32 f/ second / second/ or, if you'd prefer per second(3). That's why sports cars have "dead pedals" for the driver to brace against in corners, the seats have stiff side bolsters, and the head liner gets a "holy crap" " hang the f on " handle.

Hoped that helped and put it in perspective.

Some posters "over engineered a bit".. calculating speed and position are just stricktly a math problem. at 1.000 seconds, you are doing 32 f/sec. at 1.001 seconds, you have traveled 32 ft plus .032 ft for a total of 32.032 ft and your speed is now 32.032 f/ sec .. at 1.002 seconds, your speed is.. well, hopefully you get the idea..

Answer 7

32 ft/second square is an acceleration value meaning your speed increases 32 feet/s every second...

If that's not what you want to know then that other guy probably answered you...

Answer 8

Acceleration due to gravity means that in vacuum (without air resistance), a free falling object will INCREASE by 32.2 ft/sec every second, hence 32.2 ft/sec/sec.

This means that in the first second, the object (in vacuum) increase in speed from 0 to 32.2 ft/sec, or the average speed is 16.1 ft/sec. Hence in the first second, the object travelled only 16.1 ft.

In the next second, the object increases in speed from 32.2 to 64.4, with an average of 48.3 ft/sec. So during the second second, the object travelled 48.3 ft.... and so on.

In vacuum, an object takes less than 6 seconds to reach 193.2 ft/sec, rather than 10 seconds in a free fall of a parachutist, simply because of air resistance.

As explained in a previous answer by the engineer who works in the metric system, the terminal velocity depends on the shape factor, namely whether you have your four limbs extended (slows you down), or you curled yourself into a ball (faster). That was how James Bond managed to catch up with someone who jumped before him in one of the (older) movies.

So depending on how you stretch or shrink your limbs, the terminal velocity will be attained after a certain time, at which point the force due to air resistance equals to your weight, so you do not gain any more acceleration, so the falling velocity stays constant.

Answer 9

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Answer 10

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