Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Velocity Investigation

During this test, we were calculating the velocity of a golf ball and a ping pong ball dropped from three different heights. First, we dropped the golf ball from about one meter. The meter stick was not exact, so we did not know if that was going to effect the outcome of the velocity. When we were calculating by hand, we got a velocity of about 3.3m/s/s for the golf ball and 2 m/s/s for the ping pong ball. I didn’t think that this test was going to be very accurate when we did it by hand or with the motion sensor because we did not really know how to use the sensor and we couldn’t get exact times from doing it by hand. When we were trying to time by hand, we were doing it by eye so it was not going to be the same each time. For the second test at 2 meters, the velocity was again probably not exact because we only had one meter stick so when we tried measuring out 2 meters but we were probably moving the stick up and down so it was not still at the 2 meter mark. The velocity we calculated was 2.8 m/s/s for the golf ball and 3.3 m/s/s for the ping pong ball. For the third test, there was not enough room to drop the balls from three meters, so that was not an exact measurement either. Even though the measurement was not exact, for the velocity we got 3.3 m/s/s for the golf ball and 3.75 for the ping pong ball. When we were dropping the balls, the forces they were dropping at were 447.468 for the golf ball and 24.5 for the ping pong ball.

This is a graph