November 6,2015: Conservation of Energy

Purpose: The Purpose of this lab is to determine that Momentum and energy are conserved during a collision.

Apparatus:

 Camera for our video capture

Table for our collision 

What we did: In order to obtain the information that we need, we first had to get a video capture of our two collisions. We First took a video capture of two steel balls. The first ball was at rest at the center of our table. We gave the second steel ball an initial push so that it could collied with the ball at rest. Next we did the same process of obtaining the video capture, but with one steel ball and the other being an aluminum ball. Lastly we measured the weight of all three balls which we would later use to analyze our data.

How we collected our data: We logged onto logger pro and pulled out our first collision from the file. This put us directly into video capture where we clicked add points. This allowed us to click the position of the ball that we pushed up to the collision and through the collision. These points gave us a position vs time and a velocity vs time graph. Next we picked add point again and we followed the ball at rest before the collision and after the collision. Then we picked the scale button and scaled the table that we did our collision on. Lastly we set the axis on the table. This last step gave us a smoother position vs time and velocity vs time graph in which we analyed.PPPPP

 What we did with our data: First we obtained our x,y coordinates in respects to time. Then we got the slope of the graph by applying a linear fit. This gave us Velocity initial x (Vix) and Velocity initial y (Viy). Next we got the slope of the graph after the collision by applying a linear fit which gave us the Velocity final x (Vfx) and Velocity final y (Vfy) We did this for both balls and obtained a Vf1, Vf2, Vi1, and Vi2 in both x and y. This allowed us to make new calculated columns. One was P total x= m1V1fx+m2V2fx. The second being P Total y=m1V1fy+m2V2fy. The third was KE total= .5m1(V1x^2+V1y^2 )+.5m2(V2x^2+V2y^2)




Conclusion. After our analysis of two collisions, we were able to determine that momentum and energy are conserved during a collision.Here Are Our Calculations which Prove this statement. These are relatively close to what the Blogger pro claimed the momentum in the x and y.