Lab 2, APPLICATION EXPERIMENT: WHAT KIND OF MOTION?

For lab 2 we were assigned to find whether a provided coffee filter would fall at a constant speed,
constant acceleration, or changing acceleration. In order to do this we decided to place a motion detector on the floor and align said coffee filter with the reader above it and drop it onto the motion detector. After several tries that caused the filter to drift off of the scanner and disturb our results we elected to place several filters together in order to give the object more mass and allow it to fall straighter without being disturbed by passing persons or air currents. The result of this can be found below.

Our results were then recorded and we compared the slope of the graph to calculate its constant rate of motion to determine its rate of motion and if that rate changed or was constant, representing whether its fell constant speed, constant acceleration, or changing acceleration.

We began with an over view of the movement.

As can be seen on the graph the coffee filter slowly begins to accelerate in its constant motion due to its increase in its acceleration downwards. this rules out the question of whether the filter falls at constant speed.

In these next two we can see that the velocity and position are constantly changing, by definition ruling out the possibility of constant acceleration as the rate is not constant, rather changing. Thus we can surmise that the coffee filter falls with a changing acceleration until it hits the floor, at which point it achieves a quite constant and unchanging acceleration of zero as it is resting in place.

Problems;

While we did the best we could we acknowledge that there are some problems with this form of measurement. Firstly the most common problem was that the filter was too light and had a tendency to drift off the scanner, invalidating our readings, this can be caused by a simple drift to the right or even a person walking by and disturbing the air. Additionally we were dropping the filter from a height of roughly one meter, a height that serves well as a basis for a smaller measurement but does not allow for terminal velocity to take effect, possibly changing the experiment.