Vertical Atwood machine with heavy pulley: force and torque heavy pulley analysis.

Questions or requests? Post your comments below, and I will respond within 24 hours.

We compute the final velocity of the masses in a vertical Atwood machine with a heavy pulley by using forces and torques instead of energy. The analysis produces a system of three equations: Fnet=ma for each mass, and net torque = I * alpha for the disk, causing the heavy pulley angular acceleration. After expressing angular acceleration for the disk in terms of the tangential acceleration (which is the same as the linear acceleration for the masses), we use a nice substitution trick to compute acceleration of the heavy pulley atwood machine from the system of equations. Finally, we use 1D kinematics to compute the final speed of the masses.