Potential Energy in a Spring

When compressing an ideal spring, work is applied to the spring, and all of this work is stored in the spring as potential energy. When the spring uncompresses, pushing the mass, work is done by the spring on the mass.

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written by Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.