Physics help please? impulse/collision?

Question

I have an ForceVSTime graph and I am supposed to give the magnitude of the impulse shown. It tells me that the max force reached is 35N and I calculated DeltaTIME to be 0.05s.... It said not to use FdeltaTIME=J.... so how would I solve it?

It said something about using a similarly shaped triangle to solve it, but none of my notes say anything about triangles in the graph. the graph is almost an inverted parabola... ???

please help? I have no clue what to do next.

Answer 1

Imagine that the force were constant, then you could use FdeltaTIME=J. Your ForceVSTime graph would be a rectangle. So FdeltaTIME=J would be the area of the rectangle.

What you could try to do with your inverted parabola is approximate it with a triangle, and figure the triangle's area. Or integrate to find the area if you're into that.