November 12 2014: Moment of Inertia of a triangle

Purpose: To use a rotating disk system attached to a triangle and find the moment of inertia of the triangle.

This is a picture of how the rotating apparatus will work. The triangle will be attached to the pulley and the center of the disks. It will also rotate as the hanging mass goes up and down.

Explanation: First we are going to solve it symbolically for the moment of inertia of the triangle. Then, we are going to attach a triangle to the rotating disk system and perform experiments where a hanging mass will be attached to the system. The idea is to find the angular acceleration of the system when the hanging mass going up and down, and from there determine the moment of inertia of the system. We are going to use Logger Pro to compute the data information necessary for us to perform this lab. From that we are going to compare the results done by hand with the ones that the computer give us.

 This is the graph obtained when the triangle was placed horizontally on top of the rotating apparatus.

 This is the graph obtained when the triangle was placed vertically on top of the rotating apparatus.

This calculations show how we found the moment of inertia of the disk. The parallel axis theorem was utilized.

This calculations show the connections between the acceleration of the system, the tension and the torque of the system, therefore allowing us to calculate the moment of Inertia of the triangle.

Summary: This lab can be considered successful because the moment of inertia that we got from the calculations were close to the one obtained from the computer. There was a small difference, which can be given due to to system not being fully without friction, due to air resistance, or even errors that might have been made by us when releasing the hanging mass.