Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: redsniper on October 11, 2006, 04:01:11 pm
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I'm trying to write up the lab report for an experiment we did last week and there's something screwey with the data I have. The experiment involved a nearly frictionless air track with a little er... cart on it, which had a string tied to it that went over a pulley on the end of the track and was tied to a weight. The weight would drop and pull the cart along the track (obviously), and this was recorded with a video camera. The video can then be analyzed with some software we have, giving you the cart's position for each frame, and all of this data can be exported to a spreadsheet file.
We ran four tests with two different weights and with the track level and at an incline. The problem is that my lab partner who exported and emailed me the data just named the files as test1, test2, etc. I wrote down which test corresponded to which weight and angle combination, but I suspect I wrote it down wrong or something like that since the data don't seem to match what (I think) should be happening.
Now then, the cart should be moving the fastest with the heavier weight (200g) and level track, and slowest with the lighter weight (100g) and inclined track, right?
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yeah.
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Good. I think the files were just named backwards, as in the first test is test4.csv instead of test1.csv, etc. because the results I'm getting are exactly the opposite of what they should be. Thanks bobboau.
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if you give me the weight of the cart I could probably tell you what the acceleration should have been.
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Well, I don't know the weight of the cart but I don't need to calculate exact values for the accelerations either, I just need to show how the weight and angle will increase or decrease the acceleration. But for shats 'n giggles, let's say it's 300g.
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F=M*A
A=9.8 for anything free.
so for a 100g weight accelerating at 9.8m/s/s, the force is .980 N
so .98 N acting on now 400g (100g weight+300g cart that doesn't have any force of gravity causing an acceleration) would cause an acceleration of 2.45 m/s/s.
IIRC