Glossary entry

French term or phrase:

autoporteur

English translation:

puck

Added to glossary by Didier Fourcot
Mar 30, 2005 05:42
19 yrs ago
4 viewers *
French term

autoporteur

French to English Tech/Engineering Physics Practicals
It is a device used in Physics experiments. Some sort of a moving body that self-powered - I guess. See the following link for a picture:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.sauvecanne/ener_h.html

Proposed translations

+1
1 hr
Selected

puck

Teh "autoporteur" you have is a specifics of French market, in which a manufacturer called "Jeulin" has these huge mobiles that have a blower, a motor and a battery: the battery powers the motor that turns the blower and maintain the whole (heavy!) thing on air to keep it freely moving (on adequate perfect and level surface).
This mobile can create sparks at intervals at the centre of its lower part and thus leave marks on a paper installed on the table; this is its main feature.
This is used in most high school and university physics labs in France, and this is the picture you show. I've been teaching physics some time a go and I have used these items.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.sauvecanne/newton_1.html

If you really want to translate the Jeulin thing, then you may call it a "self-powered mobile".

The rest of the world uses "air tables": the blower and the motor are in the table, that has multiple holes in its surface; then ordinary pucks can "float" freely on this table. Pucks are much lighter and smaller, may vary in size and shape, but cannot leave marks on paper, they need some other equipment to record their movement; see description of their usage with a video camera here:
http://physics.kenyon.edu/coolphys/addeyes/addeyes.htm

So the equivalent is probably an air table with pucks to demonstrate Newton's second law elsewhere than in France:
http://demo1.physics.wisc.edu/UW-Demos_Pira/1F-NewtonsFirstL...
"1F30.11 air table puck Air table with a puck. "
http://twister.caps.ou.edu/PM2000/Chapter2.pdf
"SECOND LAW – Suppose we attach a rubber band to our air hockey puck. If we stretch
it, the puck starts to move…, if we keep it stretched the same amount, what is the
resulting motion? The speed (really the velocity) of the puck increases uniformly with
time – constant acceleration."
Peer comment(s):

agree Terry Gwenn
13 hrs
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2 KudoZ points awarded for this answer. Comment: "Thanks for your help. I guess there is no exact English equivalent so I used "puck"."
1 hr

self-bearing motor

Just an idea from the diagram and the description
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1 hr

free-moving body, freely moving body

That is: once it is set in motion, the experimenter does not change its state of motion - only external forces such as friction (plus gravity and the constraint force of the table - although if the table is horizontal, these two cancel).

See also
http://www.postbac.com/j/mod_perl/got.pl?dir=p/ts/exacon/bac...
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