13-11-2014 Moment of Inertia of a Triangle Lab#18

Purpose

The purpose of this lab is to find the moment of inertia of a triangle when it rotates about its center of mass using the same air contraption we did in lab 16.

 

  Before we could find the inertia experimentally we had to figure out our moment of inertia through our own calculations.

The calculated inertia for short is 0.5998 kg*m^2 while the inertia for the long side is 0.002593 kg*m^2.

Then once that is done we were able to use the apparatus to actually measure what the inertia is compared to the calculated.The first one that was run was without the triangle with the average acceleration being 2.469rad/s^2

Then the next was the with the triangle but with the long side up with the acceleration at 2.017 rad/s^2.

Last was the triangle with the long side down with the acceleration at 2.34 rad/s^2.

With all of the accelerations calculated we could find the moment of inertia along with the percent error.