Video · + 2 min read
(Videos) Work and Hooke's Law
by PatrickJMT
In physics work is defined as force times distance, or the force exerted over a distance. But when the force isn't constant, we need to break out integrals to help us find work.
The idea for work in calculus terms is:
Suppose an object moves along the -axis in the positive direction from to . At each point in let be the force on the object. Then the work, , needed to move the object from to is:

Hooke's Law deals with the force of a spring when it is stretched or compressed.
Hooke's Law states that the force required to maintain a spring stretched '' units beyond its natural length is proportional to (the distance that you stretch it):
Here, is referred to as the spring constant.

The first example that Patrick looks at is:
A force of 10lb is required to hold a spring stretched 4in beyond its natural length. How much work is done in stretching it from its natural length to 6in beyond its natural length? (Use foot-pounds.)
So, we want to find work and we're using a spring. Therefore, we can throw Hooke's Law into our integral equation.
The spring is starting from its natural length. You can think of this as the spring not being stretched or stretched a distance of 0. So our lower limit of integration is 0.
The spring is being stretched 6in or 1/2ft. So this becomes our upper limit of integration.
To integrate this, we need to figure out the value of . We can do this by looking at the force equation (Hooke's Law) and using the information given in the first sentence. We need 10lbs to stretch the spring 4in, or 1/3ft.
Now, we can plug this into our integral and solve.
In this video, Patrick looks at a more complicated example of Hooke's Law.
Suppose 2J of work is needed to stretch a spring from its natural length of 30cm to a length of 42cm. How much work is required to stretch it from 35cm to 40cm?
This problem is a little tricky to set up. Notice that 30cm is it's natural length. So when we look at the limits of integration (35cm to 40cm) we have to redefine them as distances from the natural length: and .
Furthermore, Joules are Newton-meters. So we need to convert these centimeters into meters: 0.05m and 0.1m. Therefore, the problem we want to solve is:
To find , we can look at the first sentence which is what's given.
We can integrate and then solve for .
Finally, we can plug this back into the integral we want to solve, and, well, solve.











