2-Oct-2014 Conservation of Energy #12

Purpose
The purpose of this lab is to measure the types of energy's with a spring and different sensors.
The types of energy's we will be covering along with there formulas are:

KE {Kinetic Energy} mass=1/2mv^2 (using motion detector)
PE {Potential Energy} mass=mgy(middle of mass)+constant=mgy(bottom of mass)
Elastic PE in spring= 1/2k(stretch)^2=1/2k(at rest spring-y(bottom of mass))
KE of Spring itself=1/2(Mspring/3)(Vend of spring)<------same as bottom Vbottom mass
GPE {Gravitational Potential Energy}of spring itself=constant+(Mspring/2)gybottom of mass
Total Energy in system: changes in oscillation

In these photos we attached the spring to the force sensor along with a motion sensor on the floor that will measure the distance that the spring is from the ground.

Then once everything is attached we measured the oscillations with logger pro to create a graph with the slope that we can use for our formulas.

Once established we input the formulas that were given to us and created a column for each designated formula then graphed them on a single graph in to get our total conservation of energy in joules.

30-Sept-2014 Work and KE Lab #11

Purpose:
The purpose of this lab is to verify the Work and energy theorem.

The way we prove this is by grabbing a cart and a block and putting it on a relatively frictionless track. The block that is on the cart is attached to a spring that is connected to a force sensor. Before attaching anything though we had to zero the force sensor. Then we attached the spring to both and stretched the spring to its at rest capacity in order to measure the length with the force sensor.

 This is a picture of the block at rest. The sensor recorded the initial distance from here to get the zero. Before collecting though we have to reverse the direction of the sensor and set the data collection to 60 points per second.

Once everything is set up and zeroed we had to stretch the spring to its max and release once the sensor was on and collecting data. the data collected originally starts as a force vs time graph. so we created one extra column using the formula KE=(mv^2)/2 to get the graph seen below.

The integral of force is the shaded area on the graph. Since the integral of force equals to kinetic energy, that blue shade is our kinetic energy.