Centrifugal force (from Latin centrum, meaning "center", and fugere, meaning "to flee") is the apparent outward force that draws a rotating body away from the center of rotation. It is caused by the inertia of the body as the body's path is continually redirected. In Newtonian mechanics, the term centrifugal force is used to refer to one of two distinct concepts: an inertial force (also called a "fictitious" force) observed in a non-inertial reference frame, and a reaction force corresponding to a centripetal force.
The term is also sometimes used in Lagrangian mechanics to describe certain terms in the generalized force that depend on the choice of generalized coordinates.
The concept of centrifugal force is applied in rotating devices such as centrifuges, centrifugal pumps, centrifugal governors, centrifugal clutches, etc., as well as in centrifugal railways, planetary orbits, banked curves, etc. These devices and situations can be analyzed either in terms of the fictitious force in the rotating coordinate system of the motion relative to a center, or in terms of the centripetal and reactive centrifugal forces seen from a non-rotating frame of reference; these different forces are equal in magnitude, but centrifugal and reactive centrifugal forces are opposite in direction to the centripetal force.
