Eli5: How do different kinds of force and energy damage things?

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Am I getting anything wrong here?

I think a knife uses force over a small area rather than energy, as pressure to cause cuts, splits and cracks.

A club can have the same pressure as the knife, but the club carries greater momentum and will knock around things more.

A bullet causes damage through the energy it carries and causes heat and deformations as it hits the target.

When people talk damage with bullets they use energy, but with melee it’s usually force. But when should I use them? Both are used at the same time but one is doing more of the effect. Don’t both result in work?

Like a force over a distance is work and thus the same as kinetic energy. Joules.

But if it’s pressure doing work I get unsure. I mix up how things break all the time.

In: Physics

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

So pressure is a bit wonky because pressure is force *per unit area*. It behaves like temperature. If you take two hot things and force them to touch, do they get doubly hot? No, they don’t. Pressures behave similarly. Doubling the material does not necessarily change the pressure.

Force is always a good thing to use. If you wish to use force, but you have been given pressure, then you must calculate what the force of that pressure is. It is equal to the pressure (force per unit area) times area, which cancels out to pure force.

Energy, Momentum, and Force are all sort of interchangeable. Energy is the conservation of force over time (hence why it can and does change with distance). Momentum is the conservation of force over distance (Hence why it can change with time).

You can convert from energy to momentum through kinetic energy and vis versa.

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