Lab 11 Carlos H. Work-Kinetic Energy Theorem

Work-Kinetic Energy Theorem Activity 

By: Carlos Hernandez

Partners: Ariel De Leon

Date: 10-5-2016

1. For this lab we will see how kinetic energy is related to work, using a spring. 

2. 

The tools utilized in this lap where; a cart, track, spring, force detector, motion detector, and a small piece of cardboard to make it easier for the motion detector to read the position. The premise of the set of the cart shown above is to after balancing out the force detector, measure the position of the card and the force by the connection to the spring.

In the top part of the graph the force was graphed by the position we selected the part of the graph that would be most useful to us as the beginning and the ending part of the graph would make our calculations faulty(I'm not sure if that is a word). After excluding the outer parts we integrated graph which gives us the work done in that period. Below we inputted values and graphed kinetic energy. The kinetic energy we got was 1.942 J while the work done was 2.379 J. this means there is about a 29% error in between the values. We did feel this percentage was fairly high so we redid the experiment as there was an uncomfortable feeling for the high percentage. 

In this trial our work turned out to be 1.996 N while the Kinetic energy in the graph below was 1.659 which gives us a error between the values of  about 27%, the percentage was still high but we believe that there might have bee error by the sudden jolt on the cart when letting it go after stretching the string and such. And the end on the lab we still manage to see how the area under the graph for force by distance gives us the work done where we can see the kinetic energy of the system, cheers.