Lab 4

Modeling the fall of an object falling with air resistance

Purpose:
To determine the relationship between air resistance force and speed.

Theory: 

Objects do not fall experiencing only the force of gravity on Earth. They also experience an opposing force created by the air they fall through. We call this force air resistance and it points opposite the direction of motion of a falling object.

Procedure:  

We make the assumption that air resistance is proportional to the velocity of the falling object. Our experiment is to drop coffee filters from a height and analyse video of the filters falling in order to create position, velocity and acceleration data for our falling objects. The first drop was one single filter, and each consecutive drop added another filter stacked on top of the previous filter(s). This increased the force of gravity acting on the object without changing the cross-sectional area which influences air-resistance. We expect the filters to reach a terminal velocity, which is the point at which the filter stops accelerating because the air resistance force is equal to the force of gravity.

Items used were; yard stick, camera and coffee filters. The yard stick was used to record distance and camera used to record data. After the data was captured we manually entered it into excel.  By using the plotted dots from the coffee filter we were able to capture the change frame to frame.

150 coffee filters = 134.2g
1 coffee filter = 0.895g

Terminal velocity vs Air resistance force

Conclusion:

We were able to successfully test the force of air resistance. Looking at our graphs we can conclude air-resistance force increases as velocity increases. Heavier objects do indeed experience more air resistance.