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Re: Truck stopping distances?

Regarding the upshot of my last post:

Thus, it would take big vehicles longer to stop than small ones
*other things being equal*.

I suspect that a scaling law like the one I derived above *besides*
energy conservation reasons may be behind the tendency of electric
powered trains to be braked regeneratively. If you can put the
train's kinetic energy back into the power grid rather than *really*
heating up a train's braking surfaces you can stop the train faster
safely electromagnetically than you can using dissipative friction
between surfaces in relative motion.

David Bowman
David_Bowman@georgetowncolleg.edu