Definition, Distance and Example of Average Velocity

If you want to learn about the Average Velocity, you have come to the right place!

The purpose of this article is to understand the Average Velocity. You will also find much other important information that you need to know. Before learning the average velocity we will learn the displacement for better understanding. At the end of this article, we will go through some examples which will help us to a better understanding of this topic.

If you do not have time to read all of the information, then read the introduction sections first.

Introduction

If we observe an object moving in a straight line at 10 km/hr for 2 hours then it moves with the speed of 5 km/hr for 2 hours. We can not understand the motion and final position of the object with this. Because the object can move in any direction. Let’s say it can move forward and then forward again. It can move forward and then backward. Here the speed of an object indicates how fast is object moving. The direction is not considered in the analysis. So velocity is the term that indicates the speed and direction both. Now, if we want to calculate the net speed of the object in its whole journey, we have to take an average of its velocity which is called the average velocity of the object.

Distance and displacement

Distance is the length of the traveled path by any object and displacement is the shortest distance traveled by any object.

For example, in figure 1 if the object wants to reach from point K to M then it has two paths first one is K-L-M and the second one is K-M. If the object follows path K-L-M then the length of the total path traveled by the object is distance. But if it follows the path K-M then it is called displacement. Because path K-M is the shortest path to reach point M from K.

Definition of average velocity

Average velocity is defined as the ratio of an object’s overall displacement and its total time of motion.

• The SI unit of average velocity is m/s.
• The dimension of average velocity is .

Example

A car started its journey from Dehradun to Delhi at the velocity of 40 km/hr for one hour. After that driver increased the velocity of the car to 60 km/hr for two hours and then 80 km/hr for 1 hour and reach the destination. During this whole journey car traveled 250 km distance. Here we can observe that at different time intervals, there are different velocities. But if we talk about the average velocity we have to take the ratio of the total displacement of the car to the total time taken by it.

So, the average velocity of the car is 62.5 km/hr in this whole journey.

Here, these different velocities i.e. 40, 60, and 80 km/hr are the velocities in certain time intervals. These are called instantaneous velocities.

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