centripetal force?

Question

what is the centripetal force acting on clothes spinning in a spin dryer

Answer 1

"Centripetal" means "center-seeking". Therefore, rather, is the force the drum exerts on the clothes, preventing them from flying outside of the dryer, in a straight-line path, tangentially to the drum, as they would if the drum were not there.

Addendum
You may have noted that references to centrifugal force, rather plentiful in the past, have decreased recently to a large degree in Physics books. This is because centrifugal force is now regarded as a ficticious or "pseudo" force, a force that appears only when observing the same object on different reference frames which are accelerated relative to each other. At any rate, even in these special reference frame, centrifugal force is always equal to centripetal force in magnitude, if opposed to it in direction.

Also, centrifugal and centripetal forces do not act on the same body. Centripetal force is exerted by the drum on the clothes, forcing them to depart from straight-line trajectories. Centrifugal force is regarded to be the force which the clothes apply on the dryer's drum, the so-called "reaction force" required by Newton's third law of motion.

http://www.answers.com/topic/fictitious-force

Answer 2

SnowZNinj is right, except for one thing. We are discussing CENTRIFUGAL force, where the clothes are forced to the rim of the drum of the washing machine by the speed of the rotation. Centripetal force moves to the inside of the rotation not the outside.

Answer 3

Its the weight of the clothes times the angular speed of the drum in radians squared, times the radius

F = mass*r*w^2

The outward force exterted on teh clothes by the rotation.