Friday December 5, 2014: Mass Spring Ocillations.

Purpose: Find the relationship between period and oscillation.

Apperatus: Spring, motion sensor, a mass and logger pro.

What We Did: Professor wolf informed us that 1/3 0f the mass of a spring actually goes into the mass for a period of oscillation. We were part of group 1 where we all had to get our mass to equal 109g and had to find our spring constant so that we could see the relationship between period and oscillation. First we weighed our mass and found it to be 12 grams which meant that only 4 grams went into the mass for oscillation. This also meant that we had to attach 105 g on our spring so that every one would be using the same amount of mass but different spring constant. Next we had to find our spring constant. To do so we set up our motion sensor to get the change in y with two different masses. We found that the position of y was .330 meters with 100 grams attached and .229 meters with 50 grams attached. To find the spring constant we used the formula …. change in force/ change in y… force was equal to Massxgravity and change in y was =.101  meters. These numbers gave us a spring constant of K=4.851  We put these numbers on the board along with every one else's. We also found the period of one oscillation using the 109g mass by using logger pro. 

What we did with this information: We plotted these numbers in an xy graph in logger pro and applied a power fit to get what we were looking for. In the x axis we put the period in seconds of each group and in the y we put the spring constant.

Conclusion #1: We Found that the relationship between period and the spring constant is that the bigger the spring constant the the faster the period and vice versa.

Part 2:

What we did: Next we got the period of oscillation using our spring for our original 109 g, 209g ,209g, and 409 g. To find the period we used the formula. Change in time(s)/ Periods. 

this gave us this chart.

IN GRAMS             period in seconds

109                                .9625

209                                1.35

309                                 1.56

409                                 1.77

Finally we plotted this and evaluated the graph

Conclusion: We found that if you use the same spring with the same spring constant that as you increase the mass to the bottom of the spring that the period of oscillation also increases.