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Oscillations and Waves in Fluids
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[QUOTE="Simon Bridge, post: 5457178, member: 367532"] Waves in air are pressure changes - which means density changes ... since a rarifaction is, by definition, a change in particle density in a volume. However - the math is about oscillations around the mean ... when the sources are talking about a pressure gradient they usually mean the mean pressure is changing smoothly, and there are oscillations about that. This should makes sense because you can already think of the speed of sound in still air... even though the presence of the sound means the air is not still. There are no "nice" derivations in the sense of "simple" ... the waves in nature are [I]described[/I] by the maths of waves. We can derive wave motion for different situations by applying Newton's Laws to models of the situation. You get how you can have wave motion for a mass on a spring right? Have you seen coupled mass-on-spring or pendulums? For bulk materials you may want to start here: [URL]http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/waves/wavemotion.html[/URL] ... and realize that the difference between states of matter is how strongly the particles are coupled to each other ... For the maths, brace yourself and look up "damped driven harmonic oscillator" and "wave equation" and "helmholtz equation". It is a common exercise for senior college students to derive the helmholtz equation for simple systems like an infinite line of small masses separated by massless springs. [/QUOTE]
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