9/11/2014 Trajectories

Purpose:

Unfortunately the purpose of this lab wasn't to just roll balls of the table.The real purpose of this lab is to use a calculate a balls initial velocity as it leaves and incline slope of the table to predict when it where it would hit another incline slope off the side of the table.


Steps we took:

We had to first setup the lab using  an aluminum v-channel for the balls slide which we attached to ring stand to have the channel on an incline slope. Then we took our steel ball and let it roll of the table to find the area it would hit the ground. With the general area of where the ball landed we put carbon paper on the a sheet of paper to mark where the ball has landed. We took about five marks of the ball falling and measured the distance from the end of the table to the spot the ball has landed. We then measured the distance the ball landed from the table and the height of the table where the ball left the table. With this we could use kinematic formulas to find out initial velocity the ball left the table.

Here is a picture of our set up lab.

Here is a picture of our calculations to find the initial velocity of the ball leaving the table.

Now that we have our initial velocity we attached an incline board end the bottom of the table going up towards where the ball is launched to predict where the ball will land on the inclined board.

Here is our calculations to predict when the ball will hit the board with the real distance and the predictions on the sheet.

Our theoretical value as shown in is 46 cm while our experimental value is 47 cm. The percent error is  (experimental - theoretical) / experimental  which is (47 - 46) / 47 =   0.02 which is  2%.

Conclusion:

The calculated value the ball would land is very close to our actual spot the ball landed. I think our biggest error calculation is the distance the ball landed from the table on our first test. The table is on wheels and our way of measuring the distance is not exact. Therefore I believe our theoretical calculations would have been correct if are initial measurement was correct.