Lab 2

Modeling the fall of an object

August 31 2016

Purpose: 

To determine if in the absence of external forces besides gravity; will a falling body accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2.

Theory: 

We can determine the experimental value of gravity by creating a controlled environment where gravity is the only variable.

Procedure: 

Our apparatus consists of a long strip of paper which will be marked by chars from our falling object. We hang our paper vertically and use some sparking device to mark the paper at equal time intervals. As the object falls, it marks the paper. This creates dots on the paper with increasing distances between the dots as the object accelerates downwards. Once the object hits the ground we then measure the distance between dots. After the data is captured we manually enter it into excel.

We use excel to create a position and velocity graphs of our data. Our position graph is concave upwards because our velocity is increasing. Our velocity graph should fit to a line because acceleration is constant. For our group, group 1, we measured our acceleration at 9.45m/s^2.

Conclusion:

The acceleration value we found is close to our control value of 9.81, yet as expected we knew we could never achieve that value with this experiment. We made the assumption that air resistance was negligible, yet in reality air resistance is significant. This accounts for the difference between 9.45 and 9.81. Mission success!