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.