September 24 2014: Centripetal acceleration as a function of angular speed

Purpose: To find the centripetal acceleration as a function of the angular speed of the system.

This is a picture of the apparatus, which is an accelerator with the disk, the picture is not clear because our group was not close to the professor's desk, and we forgot to take a closer picture.

The whole class did this lab together, each group got a stop watch, and the professor set up an accelerator with a disk that rotates. Each group was supposed to find the time in which the disk did four rotations. We did this five times, with different speed in each trial. With the average of times, we attempted to reach to a centripetal acceleration by plugging our data into the computer and creating a graph.

This is a graph that the professor obtained when plugging the data in his computer, we got this graph because he posted in moodlerooms. 

This is the average of time that the class had for the different speeds when executing the lab.

This lab was more of a consensus of data information between the groups. Each group had to time four rotations, and of course, this lead to human errors plus uncertainty. Another factor that contributed to errors was that some groups did not calculate the time for the rotations. With the average from the groups who timed the lab, we created a graph and from it we were able to calculate the centripetal acceleration of the system, showing that exists a relationship from the angular speed and the centripetal acceleration.