Friday 2 June 2023

Stationary waves at the Tebay roadworks

The orange tape on the left hand side was fixed to regular cones and was oscillating in the wind. The regular fixings acted as nodes. Mostly the tape oscillated up and down with a pattern like a skipping rope and therefore with an anti-node in between the cones. This is a classic stationary wave. For the most part, neighbouring lengths were oscillating in phase with each other - in other words, when one went up, the neighbour went up too. However, some were in anti-phase. Some others seemed to have a node in the centre of the length so they would have half the wavelength and thus double the frequncy.