What still confuses me in all this is the fact that I was taught otherwise regarding the mechanical-electric equivalences at university.
I knew that Force was Voltage, current was speed, capacitors were springs, a resistor a damper and mas was inductance. And I was taught THAT was the only convention.
In this line of thought:
By viewing a mechanical system as an equivalent of an electrical one, a different perspective can be taken on how it works and how the elements interact with each other.
There are different views as to how this equivalence should be defined, but for his work Smith has adopted the convention that force is the mechanical equivalent of current and velocity equates to voltage. Likewise, certain electrical components have mechanical counterparts. He equates the mechanical spring to the electrical inductor, the damper to a resistor and a fixed mechanical point to the electrical ground of a circuit, though he notes that up until now, within his preferred convention, there has been no obvious direct mechanical counterpart to the electrical capacitor. However, the mass of a body can be equated to a capacitor under a special set of conditions. That is, it has inertia, but that inertia is relevant to its position in space. In that sense it is like a grounded capacitor whose potential is relative to earth. What did not seem to exist was a mechanical element that could be used like a capacitor in isolation. In other words, with two terminals and the behaviour of which was dependant on the load across those two terminals and not its movement relative to its position in space.
Without this element, it would not be possible to replicate most electrical configurations mechanically.
Maybe he just used this convention because it suited his needs, still I guess that using the convention I knew you would already have solved the problem of "capacitor in isolation"
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