Lab 6: Energy part one

Lab 6: Energy part 1

To experiment with work and how it affects the energy, velocity, and movement of an object. To do this we set up a friction less track with a slider and weights and began alternating the height and placement of the slider on the track. We would then change the amount of force we exerted on the cart and monitor how fast it traveled a see how that affected the work done. We recorded this information into logger pro, here is an example of the difference between a forceful shove and actually fighting the weights to let the cart fall slower.

The data was partially conclusive with our initial prediction, that more force would move the track faster, but this did not vastly change the integral, averaging on a few 10ths of a joule where a joule is equal to Mass*Newton’s like we had thought it would. 

To expand on this we set the track up as a ramp to test out and see if height or displacement would have any effect on the integral. We varied our height by about 20cm by first testing the slider from 70 cm to 190, and then from 90cm to 190cm. our results are below, and served to concur with our prediction.

We then elevated to track and increased the incline of the ramp and used the same two distance markers.  The heights were different at the same points along the ramp at 90 cm (8.8 cm vs. 10.2 cm).  We compared the integrals and found that height does matter= .3243J vs .2074J for the first trial at a lower incline, as shown here.

These experiments show us that height matters when it comes to work being done.  Potential energy is higher when the incline is higher.  Varying force seems to not affect the work when the distance (displacement) is the same.  This all ties into work done in order to change energy in a system.

Possible issues.

One of the greatest issues we had with the experiment was ensuring that the track stopped smoothly. With such a short track we were forced to abandon several graphs due to this problem as the tracks would flip backwards and disrupt the information, making the graph useless and corrupting the integral measurement.