Newton's second law states that the resultant of the forces applied to an object is equal to the product between the object's mass and its acceleration:
where in our problem, m is the mass the (child+cart) and a is the acceleration of the system.
We are only concerned about what it happens on the horizontal axis, so there are two forces acting on the cart+child system: the force F of the man pushing it, and the frictional force
acting in the opposite direction. So Newton's second law can be rewritten as
or
since the frictional force is 15 N and we want to achieve an acceleration of
, we can substitute these values to find what is the force the man needs:
where in our problem, m is the mass the (child+cart) and a is the acceleration of the system.
We are only concerned about what it happens on the horizontal axis, so there are two forces acting on the cart+child system: the force F of the man pushing it, and the frictional force
or
since the frictional force is 15 N and we want to achieve an acceleration of
