- Freefall is free descent of a body in which the gravitational force is the only force acting on it. We did three different experiments dropping various things from a 90 degree angle.
- The distance the balls were dropped from is 10.65 m.
- We know that acceleration should be equal to 9.8 m/s^2.
Description of Experiment:
- First we went up 10.65m and divided a large clay ball into two different sizes-one small and one large. This made it so that they had two different masses. The two balls were dropped simultaneously several times while we recorded each trial to verify that they hit the ground at the same time.
- The second experiment consisted of three different balls- a ping pong ball, a bouncy ball, and a styrofoam ball. They were all dropped at the same time from 10.65 m. There were about five trials and each one was recorded. Since the balls had different masses the balls hit the ground at different times.
- The final experiment was dropping a golf ball and timing it to see when it hit the ground from the distance of 10.65 m. We had five timed trials to see if the times were consistent with each other.
The goal of the golf ball experiment was to find the acceleration and see if it was close to the known acceleration which is 9.8 m/s^2. We knew the formula for calculating distance which is d= 1/2at^2. We knew the distance which was 10.65m so that left us to calculate the average time in order to find the acceleration.
We calculated the average time that it took the golf balls to hit the ground. The average time was 1.63 seconds. Since we now had the average time we plugged the know factors into the distance problem which left us with this equation:
After finding the acceleration we calculated the percent error:
This is good - nice job.
ReplyDeleteMatt