Conservation of Energy-Mass & Spring System
Name: Carlos Hernandez
Partners: Dhalia Tran, Ariel De Leon
Date: 10-5-2016
1. The essence of this lab is to look, analyze, and understand the energy in a vertically- oscillating mass-spring system where the mass of the spring is non-negligible( has to be taken into account). (the reason this lab has the text centered is because there is a glitch that doesn't let me write from left to right.)
In this lab the utensils that were used where; a spring, mass , motion detector, a paper to make the motion detector read the position better and Logger Pro. the information retrieved is the following , Mass of Spring = .065 kg, Mass Hanging On Spring = .45, Height in the Bottom = 1.23 m.
After making out spring oscillate up in down in a smooth motion we managed to get this beautiful sinusoidal graph which is essential to help us get the spring constant which was k= 16
In this problem we needed to integrate the sum of all the Gravitational potential energy by getting a small piece of dm of the spring, and dh, and the integration was from a y from the bottom to dm. Another thing that was solved for was an expression for Kinetic Energy for the spring.The elastic potential energy equation that was used was .5*K*X. So the total energy for the system was 1. Gravitational of the handing mass and spring, 2. KE of the hanging mass and spring, 3. And Elastic Energy. The work for the calculated equations is below.
All the equations for energy were input into logger pro and are below.
The sum of all these energy throughout the entire position should remain relatively constant, I believe if there is much error it would be in measurements or calculations, I was pretty happy with the graph we got for the motion and feel like there isn't much more places where error could be at. In this lab we see and experiment with the Conservation of Energy extensively and feel like at first it was quite difficult to understand but looking back, was very helpful and makes perfect sense. Cheers