9-Sept-2014: Trjectories

Purpose:
To experience and better understand projectile motion and to predict where an object might land.

Apparatus:

The set up, on the left, is for part 1 of the lab which was to make a ramp out of aluminum v-channel" that gave the velocity to the steel ball. The ball shoots out of the ramp and lands somewhere on the carbon paper which was on the floor.

The set up on the right is for part 2 of the lab, which has the same set up but we added a board that rests on the table at one end and the other end rests on the floor which results in a diagonal position. A piece of carbon paper was placed somewhere on the board to see if the landings are correct according to the prediction.

Explanation:
The first part was to find the initial velocity by shooting the steel ball out of the ramp 5 times and landing on the carbon paper that was placed on the floor. With the results of 5 different landings, we took the average, measured the height of the table, and calculated initial velocity to be 1.73m/s. With the initial velocity, we were able to predict where the ball will land if the board was in place (Part 2 of this lab). The board was placed at a 48 degree angle above the horizontal. We solved symbolically for the distance of where the ball will land and plugged in numbers, and the result was around 1.01m. We, then, rolled the ball off the ramp five more times and the distance was between 0.94 to 0.98 meters, giving us a 2.97 to 7.45% error.

finding initial velocity and distance

continuation of finding distance

Conclusion:
In this lab experiment, we explored projectile motion and measured distance of where the steel ball might land. We first found initial velocity by rolling the ball off the ramp to see how far the ball will travel, and measured the height of the table. Then we predicted the distance where the steel ball will land if the board was placed in front of the ramp. We average a 5.21% error, which is considerable acceptable.