Example

A swimmer prepares to cross a river by swimming perpendicular to

the current with a constant speed of 2.0 m/s. The swimmer starts
from A, however, ends up at B, a point downstream, due to the
current that diverted him.

If the speed of the current is 0.8 m/s and all speeds are assumed
constant, find the speed of the swimmer as seen by an observer
standing on the shore.

Solution

Figur
e 6. Sum of velocities by the parallelogram method. Source: F. Zapata.
An observer standing on the shore would see the swimmer being
deflected by the resulting velocity V R . To find the answer we need
to vector add the speed of the swimmer with respect to the water
and the speed of the current, which we call V river :

V R = V swimmer + V river
 In the figure, which is not to scale, the vectors were added to
obtain V R . In this case, the Pythagorean theorem can be applied
to obtain its magnitude:

V R
2
= 2.0 2 + 0.8 2 = 4.64

V R = 2.15 m/s

The direction in which the swimmer deviates from the

perpendicular direction is easily calculated by noting that:

θ = arctg (2/0.8) = 68.2º

Then the swimmer deviates 90º – 68.2º = 27.2º from his original
direction.

We will solve this example using the parallelogram method

We have the following vectors:

We find the opposite of vector b:

We find the resultant by drawing lines parallel to each vector to form a parallelogram: