Practice Problems for Final

1. You fix a ring with a radius of 5 cm that has +5 mC of charge placed on it to your desk. You have
a small metal ball with a mass of 5 g and you want to levitate it 5 cm above the axis of the ring.
How much charge must you place on the ball? What sign must the charge have?
2. Suppose you have an insulating sphere with a radius R = 25 cm and a variable volume charge (r)
= 0R2/r2 where 0 = 6 C/m3. Using Gausss Law, determine the electric field at a distance of:
a. 10 cm from the center of the sphere
b. 20 cm from the center of the sphere
c. 30 cm from the center of the sphere
3. Using the same set up as question 1, now imagine you fire a proton from infinity and you want it
to stop 10 cm from the ring above its axis. How fast would you have to fire the proton for this
scenario to occur?
4. Suppose you create a parallel plate capacitor with two sheets of metal with areas of 400 cm2.
a. How far apart must the plates be if you want your capacitor to have a capacitance of 3
nF?
b. Suppose you then charge up the capacitor by connecting to a 100 V source. How much
charge will lie on each of the capacitors plates once it is charged?
c. Suppose you now remove the capacitor from the circuit and insert a dielectric and
afterwards you measure the potential difference between the plates of the capacitor to be
66.7 V. You also find that the charge on the plates is unchanged. What is the dielectric
constant of the dielectric material?
d. What is the difference in energy stored in the capacitor before and after the dielectric was
inserted?
5. You connect two resistors R1 and R2 in parallel and connect them to a emf source and determine
that the power of the system is 60 watts. You then remove R2 and determine that the power of the
system is 10 watts. If you are told that R2 has a resistance of 6 ohms, what is the resistance of R1?
6. Suppose you have a 50 ohm resistor and a 5 mF capacitor connected to a 50 V source. How long
will it take the capacitor to reach:
a. 10 % of its total charge
b. 50 % of its total charge
c. 63.2 % of its total charge
7. A vertically oriented square loop of wire with negligible mass, a side length of .1m, and a
resistance of 10 ohms has a mass of 1 kg hanging from it. One end of the loop is in a magnetic
field pointed into the page. If the loop of wire is connected to a voltage source of 100 V and the
loop is observed to be floating in mid-air, what is the strength of the magnetic field that one end
of the loop is in?
8. Two long parallel wires carry the same amount of current in opposite directions. These wires are
suspended from two common points by massless threads 1 m long. If the wires have a mass per
unit length of .016 kg/m and hang at an angle of 5 degrees from the vertical (10 degrees of total
separation) how much current is flowing in each wire?
9. A circuit consisting of a 10 ohm resistor, a 5 V source and an ammeter is constructed so that the
wires form a square with sides of 10 cm. Draw this circuit so that the current flows

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counterclockwise. If the circuit is put into a uniform magnetic field into the page that is
decreasing at a rate of 150 T/s, what does the ammeter read?
Derive a formula for the self-inductance of a long solenoid with n turns per unit length, a length l,
and a radius r.
Consider an a/c LRC circuit. You connect your elements to a 50 V source and you use an
ammeter to determine the current flowing through the circuit, which you determine to be .2 A.
You also know that circuit is operating at 1591.5 Hz and that the inductor has a value of 80 mH
and your capacitor has a value of 167 nF.
a. What is the resistance of the resistor?
b. Suppose that the inductor in the circuit can be varied. Find the value of inductance for the
inductor that would put the circuit in resonance.
c. If the circuit is in resonance, how much current will be flowing through the circuit?
Light in an unknown material is incident upon a boundary with water. If when the incident angle
is greater than or equal to 56 degrees no light passes into the water, what is the speed of light in
the unknown material?
Suppose you have a converging lens with a focal length of 10 cm and a diverging lens with a
focal length of 20 cm. You first place an object at a point and then put the converging lens 15 cm
to the right of the object. You then place the diverging lens 15 cm to the right of the converging
lens. Keeping the object and the diverging lens stationary, you want to move the converging lens
to the right side of the diverging lens without changing the position of the final image. Where
must you place the converging lens with respect to the diverging lens?
You set up a double slit experiment using a laser with a wavelength of 633 nm and a pre-made
double slit with a spacing of .012 mm. Theoretically, how many total bright fringes will you see
on your screen? (Note that most of the bright fringes would be too faint to see in real life)
Light from a laser with a wavelength of 633 nm passes through a slit with a width of .25 mm. The
resulting diffraction pattern is projected on a wall 15 m away from the slit. How wide is the
central maximum? If the entire room is suddenly filled with water, how wide will the central
maximum be?
You place a 1.5 kg piece of aluminum at 400 degrees C in a closed chamber with 100 grams of
ice at -20 degrees C. What is the equilibrium temperature of the system?
Suppose you have 1000 m3 of hydrogen at atmospheric pressure and 20 degrees C and you want
to store this hydrogen in containers with a volume of 2 m3 and a pressure of 1.5 * 106 Pa and at
the same temperature. How many containers would be required? How many containers would be
required if before you stored the hydrogen, it heated up to 35 degrees C?
Suppose you increase the volume of an ideal gas at a constant pressure of 101,300 Pa
(atmospheric pressure) from 30 cm3 to 1300 cm3. How much work is done? If the pressure in this
system were equal to the pressure on Venus (92 atm), how much work is done?
Suppose you want to design a Carnot engine with an efficiency of .75 using a hot reservoir with a
temperature of 400 degrees C. What must the temperature of the cold reservoir be? If you wanted
the engine to be able to perform an amount of work equal to 5000 J, how much heat is wasted?