13 October 2014: Impulse-momentum with two carts

Purpose: To verify the impulse-momentum theorem.

This is the track and cart that we used to calculate the momentum of the system.

 This is the cart with a certain weight on top of it, to calculate the new momentum.

This is the cart stuck on the mass of clay, to calculate a third momentum in inelastic collision, where the cart does not repulse back.

Explanation: First, we set the system just as the pictures above. The first two pictures show a system where the cart is repulsed back by the red cart. To calculate the force of repulsion, we attached a force sensor on the blue cart. To calculate thing such as distance, time, we used a motion sensor on the end of the track. The idea is to push the blue cart with some force, where the red cart will repulse it back, from that, we are going to calculate the momentum by doing a force vs. time graph and calculating the integration of that area. To make sure our numbers are accurate, we also did calculations by hand, where we got the velocity before and after collision to find the momentum. For the third experiment, using the clay, we did the same procedure, but in the calculations by hand, the final velocity is 0.

These are the graphs that we got in our first experiment, with only the blue cart and the red one. The last graph shows the force vs. time graph, and the momentum is the area of it. It came out to be -0.2723 s*N

 These are the graphs that we got in our second experiment, the blue cart had some weight on it on this trial. The last graph shows the force vs. time graph, and the momentum is the area of it. It came out to be -0.6706 s*N

These are the graphs for the last experiment, where the cart glues on the mass of clay. The last graph is the force vs. time graph, and the momentum came out to be -0.2351 s*N

This are the calculations by hand that we did to show that the values that we got for each momentum was accurate. The equation used was mass*velocity(final) - mass*velocity(initial) = momentum.

Summary: To start, we set the cart, track, motion sensor and force sensor system. We calibrated the motion and force sensor to give us accurate values. We run each experiment, where the blue cart was pulled into a red cart on the first two experiments, and into a mass of clay of the third experiment. The force and motion sensor gave us values to work with. We created a force vs time graph for each experiment, and the area of that graph would give us the momentum of the system in each trial. To ensure that the momentum value was accurate, we also performed calculations by hand, and because the numbers were close, we can say that our experiment was successful.