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The actual mechanical advantage of a pulley is 2. The pulley has 3 supporting strings. What is the efficiency of the pulley?
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KGUS eNotes educator | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
Hello.
The efficiency of a simple machine can be expressed as the ratio of the actual mechanical advantage divided by the theoretical mechanical advantage. You were given the actual mechanical advantage as 2, so you only need to determine the theoretical mechanical advantage. With a pulley system, this becomes a simple matter of determining how many strings support the pulley, which was nicely given as three. Therefore, the efficiency in this case is 2/3, or about 67%.
