Thursday, November 20, 2014

19 November 2014: Conservation of Linear and Angular Momentum

Purpose: To determine whether the speed of the system was conserved.

                                                    
The apparatus' for this system are a marble ball, a ramp where the ball is released from, a rotating disk system, a ball catcher and a hanging mass attached to the pulley on top of the rotating disk system.

Explanation: First we are going to release the marble ball from the ramp and let it hit the ground. From that, we are going to calculate the initial speed of the ball. Then we are going to release the ball again from the ramp, but this time the ball catcher in the rotating disk system will catch it. This will make the system accelerate, therefore the hanging mass will start to decrease. The idea is that by having the right information we will be able to determine to moment of inertia of the system. With that we will be able to calculate the final speed of the system.

This is the first calculation, where we released the marble ball and it hit hit ground. We found the initial speed in which the ball exits the ramp.

This calculation shows how we found the moment of inertia of the system. 

 This picture is the angular velocity of the system once the ball hits the ball catcher, we used the average velocity to finish this lab.


This is the calculation that we did to find the new moment of inertia of the system once the marble ball hit the ball catcher, and the final angular velocity of the system.


Summary: We can say that this lab was successful. Because of the fact that we did the lab with the whole class together, we were able to compare all the steps with the other groups. This was really useful, since every calculation we did, we would check to see if the other groups were having similar answers. In the end, when we found the final angular velocity of the system, three other groups had the same answer. This shows that we were in the same pace with them, once we had the same values to conclude this lab experiment. 

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