Sunday, October 20, 2019

kinematics - Can the initial time be non-zero?


I am just slightly confused about how initial time is chosen in mechanics. I keep thinking I have understood it but some doubts come up later.


Basically when I derived the constant acceleration equations in a general way I ended up with v(t)=v(0)+at and x(t)=x(0)+v(0)t+12at2. However, I didn't set any initial conditions at this point, all I did was derive them using integration then set t=0 to get the constants of integration.


Now I understand that we can use a value other than t=0 to find the constants, however t=0 is convenient.


What I don't understand, is whether by setting t=0 to find the constants, I have now somehow implicitly chosen t=0 as the initial time? Because if t=0 was not the initial time, then it should be impossible to have t=0 (am I wrong in thinking this?)


In short, my question is: did I implicitly choose an initial time of t=0? If not, then regardless of how ugly the end result becomes, am I free to choose a nonzero initial time so that my first equation becomes Δv=v(0)+atv(t0) (where I simply subtracted v(t0) from both sides, where t00, as I just said) and the second one becomes Δx=x(0)+v(0)t+12at2x(t0). I am not concerned with how ugly these are, I am simply wondering if they are correct in principle?


Also, if I wanted to make them not-ugly, I know how to do that: I would choose the t value when finding the constants of integration as t=t0 rather than t=0. In other words, my initial time is t=t00, hence v(t)=adt=at+c and instead of setting t=0 here, I instead let t=t0 to get v(t0)=at0+c or c=v(t0)at0, hence v(t)=v(t0)+a(tt0). Then I would integrate again to get x(t)=v(t0)t+12a(tt0)2+c and setting t=t0 again gives c=x(t0)v(t0)t0 so that x(t)x(t0)=v(t0)(tt0)+12a(tt0)2.




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